Quotes from Paul Park

I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.

Sometimes, a writer 'character' is just a projection of a person who is writing the story, but not necessarily 'me.'

Meta-fiction doesn't depend on the illusion that you're reading about real people.

Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.

And you're disappointed in the story. I know you wanted a love story.

There's nothing cruel about a vampire or a parasite, she said.

Sometimes you've just got to let them scream, right?

Everything that is not as it appears, I think it is from your country.

The heroine might be unsure. And the reader. But I don't think the author should be.

That's why it's difficult to write about your own life. Any distortion feels like a betrayal.

We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear. Memory, for example, serves such a function.

Every character in a story, I thought when I had folded up the phone, has both a purpose and a secret purpose.

So maybe it wasn't even true that I could choose to share in the world's future. It wasn't a matter of simple nostalgia. For a long time, for many people and certainly for me, the past had taken the future's place, as any hope or sense of forward progress had dried up and disappeared. But now, as I aged, more and more the past had taken over the present also, because the past was all we had.

Ah, how hard it was, even half-delirious or asleep, to conceive of something new!