#fiction

Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. ↗

— Carol Alt

#fiction #sometimes #stranger #than

We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week. ↗

— Miguel Ferrer

#brought #clear #coming #complex #concepts

As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust. ↗

— Charles W. Chesnutt

#converted #dust #fiction #into #life

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#american #because #become #force #had

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#kafka #novel #writing #dreams

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to. ↗

— Helen Fielding

#confusions #doing #down #fiction #how

Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision. ↗

— Marion Zimmer Bradley

#encourages #envision #explore #fiction #futures

New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God. ↗

— Tim LaHaye

#breed #dreamed #estimation #fiction #fiction writers

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really. ↗

— Paul Kane

#author #believe #comes #fiction #i

Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases. ↗

— David Brin

#berlin #berlin wall #cases #failures #fall