Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gregory Benford

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.

Mark Billingham

More than 100 years after he first appeared, Holmes remains the template for the fictional detective.

Denis Diderot

How easy it is to tell tales!

Elizabeth Bowen

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Elizabeth Bowen

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Elizabeth Bowen

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Sarah Dessen

I have a tendency to embellish: I think it's a weakness of fiction writers. Once you know how to make a story better, it's hard not to do it all the time.

Elizabeth McCracken

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

Sue Monk Kidd

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

Denis Johnson

We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.

Denis Johnson

I didnt finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldnt work and I didnt have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.

Edgar Allan Poe

You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.

Eleanor Roosevelt

About the only value the story of my life may have is to show that one can, even without any particular gifts, overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable if one is willing to face the fact that they must be overcome.

Eduardo Galeano

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: Tell me! Tell me! The stories choose me.

Elizabeth Bishop

I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?

Elizabeth Edwards

A lot of sad stories in a row - that wears on you.

Elizabeth Bowen

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

Elizabeth Bowen

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

Deborah Moggach

My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.

Denis Diderot

Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

Edmund White

I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.

Anthony Zuiker

This won't be a novelty stunt where he opens the show up and disappears.

Graham Swift

The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.

Alice Oswald

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Alexander McCall Smith

With '44 Scotland Street' I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional novel.

Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Ezra Taft Benson

Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.