Quotes About Fiction

Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper.

In general I'm more attached to a cinema that tries not to replicate the real world and life.

We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

You know if you pick up a beach read, you're excused from the problems in your own life and safe in a world with conflicts you understand, and you know you will get a happy ending.

I wish my real life could be as simple and scripted as it is on television.

Novels are longer than life.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

While I find inspiration in real life, the actual stories are, thankfully, works of fiction - which, given the considerable turmoil in my character's lives, is probably a good thing!

Well, I think that people are smart enough to understand the difference between a movie and real life.

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

Life is much weirder than fiction; nothing's more absurd.

Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would.

It's not enough simply to record the way people actually talk. The dialogue must be concentrated, shaped, dramatically moving, in a way that real-life conversation seldom is.

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

No one in life can ever match fiction

While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.