Quotes About Fiction

I wholeheartedly believe that super heroes can play in virtually any storytelling genre.

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.

The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as 'fiction' and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called 'nonfiction' strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

I don't think of my characters as people I create, I think of them more as people I have met and whom I'm exploring on the page. I don't actually think of myself as having 'created' any of these people.

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is of greater weight, and their judgment more to be relied on, because they are believed to have paid attention, not to matters of fiction, but to the investigation of the truth.

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

If you're going to pretend to be somebody you're not - which is the whole point of being a rock star - then why not just invent fake characters and have them do it all for you?

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Most fiction series are written so that the reader can come in at any point and not feel lost, but if you can start at the beginning, why not?

It's our job as fiction writers to provide a delight that nothing else can - to such a degree that people have no choice but to read our work. Now that's a very tall order, if not impossible. But why not try?

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.

There's nothing nicer than a wicked bad person in a story is there? It's fun.

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish - or read - books that have a wide potential audience. But it does generate a certain plodding sameness of tone and subject matter that plagues a lot of contemporary American fiction.

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

We range widely, we readers of fiction, but I think we all need a home. Mine is science fiction. It's my home shelf, my homeland, my home planet, my essential genre.