Quotes About Fiction

I'd always thought that if Python was going to go on at all, it'd be nice to get into storylines.

My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability to lie with a straight face as a child.

The qualities that make parties such a nightmare for people - and also so pleasurable - make them incredibly important inside of fiction. There's a chaos agent quality to them: You just don't know who's going to be there or why. You could run into an old enemy, an old friend, an old friend who's become an enemy.

'Scream Queens' is its own reality.

'Galaxy Quest' is a fantastic film.

In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also - philosophically, politically - I just feel like that's the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I'm not interested in human individuality; I don't even know what that means.

The great thing about 'Allen Gregory' is that we try to make it really questionable that the things he says have happened, have really happened. We like that ambiguity.

A lot of people think the best work I've done was nonfiction - the 'Brothers and Keepers' book. But I think of myself as a fiction writer. And I think, if my work is put in perspective, all the books would be a continual questioning of what's true and what's not true, what's documented and what's not documented.

Questions are fiction, and answers are anything from more fiction to science-fiction.

Ezekiel Boone's books, starting with 'The Hatching' series, are meant to be big, sprawling, smart, entertaining books that are fun above all else; the literary novels written under my real name, Alexi Zentner, are certainly a little more quiet.

Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it's the first one I can truly remember.

A magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, and actors pull truth from fiction.

We believe 'Peter Rabbit' because Beatrix Potter believes it. You have to.

What has bothered and angered radical Muslims is that I'm a non-Muslim writing anything at all about Islam. But this is fiction, and I don't think Islam is above criticism or fictionalization any more so than Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism or Hinduism is.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.

I admit to subscribing to all the celebrity rags. The best part of being an author is if the celebs aren't being ridiculous enough, you can just make it up.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

If you pick up a copy of 'A Better World,' you'll lose those last five pounds while saving a baby seal under a rainbow. I kid. It'll be ten pounds.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

It might be the history major in me, but I look to the past when I try to construct my fictional futures.