Quotes About Fiction

"The Wolfpack" is a real life clash of life and fiction and the saving power of brotherhood and make-believe.

If you want to be true to life, start lying about it

Real life isn't required to be logical, but fiction has to make sense.

Larger than life is your fiction in a universe made up of one.

I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can't be wrapped up with a nice little bow

I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

I don't really want to write fiction at all. I don't see why fiction is necessary when we have real life already confusing enough.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

... if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it?

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

It's great fun to memorize somebody's biography, and then liberally play with the real facts of their life and go a step beyond reality.

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

In fiction the story lives the more everyone comes to life, the more each character seems to exist in his or her own right.

The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.

- I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it. + Then you shouldn't be a writer.

Sometimes minor characters are based on people I know, on friends of mine. But I'm not writing a thinly veiled version of my own life.

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

Life should imitate romance literature far more often.

Fiction is an improvement on life

The worst evils of life are those which do not exist except in our imagination.

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.