Quotes About Fiction

I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature.

I hardly ever read mainstream fiction that deals with life as it is. I like an element of fantasy, something that isn't quite of the real world.

Life would be so much easier if fictional boys were real.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way.

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that's not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.

Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.

The hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.

Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.

When you have a movie about people landing from planet Neptune, you suspend disbelief. I totally get it. But I like doing things that happen in real life.

The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

Movies are different from real life.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

The characters do have a life of their own; it's weird.

The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.

'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality.

Real life is crazier than fiction.

It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.

I'm nothing like Romeo in real life.

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

That's the wonderful thing about writing, you can take things you haven't done properly in your own life and make it better in fiction.

The thing I respond to the most is just great writing, interesting characters. I like to think that there is something fun about playing a character that has a lot of authority in her own life.