Quotes About Fiction

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

When I was a kid, which was just after Edison invented moving pictures, there were films that involved aliens coming to Earth for bad purposes.

Whenever I've had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author's note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course.

Myth and mythology often serve constructive and aspirational purposes. But they also do harm.

I love anything that really pushes the envelope as far as where it takes your mind. When it's well written and brings you into a world that possibly could be, I think that's the most entertaining for me - to see something that could actually take place and causes you to think.

Science fiction is my way of pushing the imagination onward. It's a way to understand how the world will look in the future.

Pushing the boundaries of polite society does not just fall under the purview of crime fiction authors.

I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

The Republican Party is too fixated on this fiction of electability.

Balthazar Balsan is not a self-portrait. If he was, I'd have made the character more flattering.

Fiction has always been a way of examining society and its flaws and trying to expose them.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

My biggest disappointment is that once I'm finished working on the characters, I really do expect to see them in the flesh one day.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

I have a great fondness for the liars in my stories.

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

The goal, first and foremost, is to tell a satisfying - entertaining - story.

You just have to kind of remember that it's just a character on TV. A lot of times people just forgot that and it's easy to do.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment.

I never like to put myself in the stories; in 'Lost in the City,' there are fourteen stories, and there's only one, 'The First Day,' about a little girl going to school, that has anything to do with me.

Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding - the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame.

You don't have to be a criminal to write about fraud!