Quotes About Fiction

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they're somehow discovering reality, but of course that's just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer.

Fiction is able to encompass books that are bleak and which dwell on the manifold and terrible problems of our times. But I don't think that all books need to have that particular focus.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'

The challenge in fiction is to write a terrific story. The challenge in journalism is to communicate solid, objective information. The challenge in creative non-fiction is to do it both and to do it well.

I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.

By comparison, 'The Secret Agent' is not especially prescient about terrorism, certainly not technically. The Professor was a stock figure of Edwardian fiction, and his dreams of mass destruction were nothing ahead of their time. Many novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved plots far more deadly.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

Michael looked around and realized that he was in a school library, with a life-size cutout of Alex Rider staring at him from the opposite side of the room.

Michael looked around and realised that he was in a school library, with a life-size cut-out of Alex Rider staring at him from the opposite side of the room.

One intriguing way to enter into the battle between good and evil, life and death, sanity and madness, is in the pages of fiction.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Excellence in Western Fiction, is a member of the American Writers Hall of Fame and is a Pulitzer Prize nominee.   Vaughn is also a retired army officer, helicopter pilot with three tours in Vietnam. And received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart, The Bronze Star with three

Can stories as stories be true of reality other than that posited in the storytelling itself? Can Aristotle's criterion of a good story apply to nonfiction, as he himself did not think it did?

That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and have seen too much to believe it.' "It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing.