"The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form."

Fiction, Pleasure, Writing

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"The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form."

Exlpore more Fiction quotes

"It all floats down here!"

Stephen King, American Author

Fiction, Fear, Mystery, Darkness, Horror

"The whole point of the wish business was to see to it that what the client got was exactly what he asked for and exactly what he didn't really want."

Terry Pratchett, English Author

Fiction, Wish, Desire, Irony, Mistake

"An Assassin, a real Assassin, had to look like one - black clothes, hood, boots, and all. If they could wear any clothes, any disguise, then what could anyone do but spend all day in a small room with a loaded crossbow pointed at the door?"

Terry Pratchett, English Author

Fiction, Disguise, Fear, Danger

"It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works."

Terry Pratchett, English Author

Fiction, Magic, Truth, Wisdom, Power

"Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you."

Terry Pratchett, English Author

Fiction, Adventure, Truth, Regret, Power

"To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language."

Jeanette Winterson, British Novelist

Fiction, Language, Past

"Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction, created by Wall Street and the media."

Robert Lutz, American Executive

Fiction, Media

"If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination."

Harold Brodkey, American Author

Fiction, Reality, Word, Writer

"And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Fiction, Art, Challenges, Growth

"If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine."

William Gass, American Novelist

Fiction,

Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively

"There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history."

History

"We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance."

Choice

"I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence."

Memory

"You learn a lot, writing fiction."

Fiction

"Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present."

History

"I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past."

Past

"I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction."

Fiction

"I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are."

Change

"I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for."

Now

"We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from."

Identity