Quotes about Writing and Life from Today’s Fiction Writers

We’ve all seen quotations from famous authors of the past.  I decided to limit my list of quotations only to authors who are still writing fiction.  I also tried to remove as much as possible the pomposity that frequently creeps in to authors’ quotes. 

 “Words at night were feral things.”    –   Joy Williams

 “Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.”   –   Paul Theroux

 “I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought;  There is nothing in the breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.”     –   Hilary Mantel in “A Place of Greater Safety”

 “Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.”  –     J. M. Coetzee

 “Sometimes he wishes he could gather all the dogs he loved most and walk off the end of the world with them.“     –    Lydia Millet in “Love in Infant Monkeys”

 “Lists are a form of power.”     –  A. S. Byatt

 “Despite all that happens to you, you are, in the end, no better than the rest of us who must fight to stay afloat.  We want, we fight, we rage, we fail, we succeed.  Where were you when they taught us that?”    –   Edward P. Jones in “A Poor Guatamalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru”

 “Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events”     –  Michel Faber

 “That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”        –     Arundhati Roy

 “We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.”    –    Salley Vickers

 “Evil is the refusal to see one’s self in others.”    –   Richard Powers

 “I never change, I simply become more myself.”    –   Joyce Carol Oates 

“I have always felt that life was simply a series of personal humiliations relieved, occasionally, by the humiliations of others.”   –     Lorrie Moore

 “There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this.”    –   Alice Munro

 “It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.  And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show that they had equal value.”      –   Ian McEwan

 “The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.”    –   Karen Russell in “Swamplandia”

 “I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don’t like to write – I like to be finished.”    –   Richard Price