On Fiction Quotes

Crime fiction is a genre for writing stories about people - about conflict, about guilt, about passion, about the human condition.

Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

The fiction I tend to like is nothing like my own work. I like the kind of writing that shows me things I don't know about, and what I don't know about is the everyday, normal world.

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

For me, writing plays is far more an act of the mind than of the emotions. It's a very different kind of impulse than fiction writing.

To be perfectly frank: I don't write women's fiction. I write intimate, gritty, realistic, character-driven fiction that happens to be thrown into the women's fiction category.

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.

I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

What is fiction or cinema if not escape?

When I read any book, if it's really good I get lost in the writing whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I'm in the story not thinking about who wrote it.

Myth is very powerful and fiction is very powerful.

Yeah I loved, as a kid growing up, I loved science-fiction.

For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.

Paranormal fiction offers authors - and readers - the chance to answer the question, what if? All the different ways that question can be answered make for extremely entertaining reading.

One of my favorite things about supernatural fiction is its vast array of creatures.

True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction--don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.

Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage.

I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

You can't be a serious writer of fiction unless you believe the story you are telling.

All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.

Actually, the zapping light was kinda like Sookie’s fairy-light-thing. Do you think there’s any chance I’m a fairy?” “No, Z. Focus. True Blood is fiction. This is the real world.

I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

I was just about to begin writing Mirror Mirror, within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.

Just as some things are too strange for fiction, others are too true for journalism.

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

I love the grandiosity of Hollywood movies, and even in independents, I love the canvas you can tell your story on. I love fiction filmmaking, you really feel like you're creating something.

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

Dialogue in fiction is always written to be read in silence. The page is the limit. Dialogue on stage and on the screen is meant to be spoken. The voice is the limit.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.

When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.

American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.

Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation.

That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.

It's said that if two documentary filmmakers meet they talk about the world, if two fiction filmmakers meet they talk about the million that they don't have to make their film.

Every fiction has its base in fact.

Top-shelf fiction, a Crown Royal ride into the heart of Night and New York. Con Lehane's work is reminiscent of the best of Lawrence Block, which is to say that this is very good stuff, indeed.