Quotes About Fiction

Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.

I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.

Any writer kind of who knows what they're doing goes forth and grabs a copy of an issue of something that they want to be published in, or they skim it online. They read what that market has been doing. They see a particular flavor of fiction.

I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.

Without always meaning to, I write really long short stories, 60-pagers, 90-pagers, pieces of fiction that are too long for all but the bravest magazines to print, and too short for all but the bravest book publishers to publish.

In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.

I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn't room for what I wanted to write.

I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did, and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

Genre stuff is really hard to pull off, as any fans of it know.

My main problem with fiction is that once my characters get moving, you just have to follow them along and get out of the way of the story, but sometimes they pull me in too many directions, and I need to focus.

Sex and death, the magnetic poles of fiction, attract us children's writers no less than adult authors, but we have to be more leery of their pull.

For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood.

It's not highly intellectual material. I'm dedicating it to the pulp fiction of the past.

Publishers have published women's fiction into a corner, and now we are all trying to punch our way out of it. We just have to write the best books we possibly can and hope that, once the pink covers and Bridget Jones have faded from memory, we might finally be allowed just to be called writers.

It's always been tough to imagine the T.U.F.F. Puppy animal gang living next to Danny Phantom.

Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

There are no black and white, good or bad characters in 'Game Of Thrones,' but Joffrey was an exception. Just pure evil.

Real stories - whether in pure fiction or historical - have a certain indefinable power; we are endlessly curious about the past and hungry for learning that we hope will illuminate the present.

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.

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

Sometimes I'll write something that's purely autobiographical, and sometimes pure fiction, and sometimes a mix.

I've read enough dreary campus novels to know more than I ever wanted to about the punctured Oxbridge academic psyche, and feel as if I've been through a mid-life crisis dozens of times, purely because I've foolishly grabbed a paperback by an author I've vaguely heard of.

I'm a daydreamer - a purposeful one when I'm writing fiction.