Quotes About Fiction

I'm not good at dialogue. I'm not good at holding a mirror up at a real world. I'm not good at believable characterisation.

I write something that I believe I've made up, and it's only when a friend later points it out to me that I realise I've been writing about myself again.

Whether you've done anything wrong or not people will write whatever they want, so it's just a matter of not reading it, not buying into it, and hopefully the people that do read it realise that it's just fictional stories for entertainment.

One of the things I have noticed about my novels is that they all concern people who can't quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives... I've come to realise that this interest in damaged, untellable stories comes from my parents.

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.

When I was about eight, I realised the person whose name was on the book got money for it, and it seemed almost too good to be true that you could get paid for making things up.

I actually started out as a writer and then converted to illustration because I realised that there was a dearth of good illustrators in genre fiction, at least in Australia at that time.

The cinema that interests me departs from realism.

I read a lot of fantasy as a kid. I read 'The Hobbit' and all of the 'Lord of the Rings' books, but I also read a lot of realism like 'The Outsiders.'

Those of us who thought Jorge Luis Borges was a pioneer of magical realism were mistaken; he was a pioneer of science fiction.

The fact is, for all the critics' talk about me as a realist, I'm making everything up - everything. It is all about imagining with me.

I am a social realist writer.

Part of a horror movie has to be a bit fakey for me to really enjoy it. The new ones are so realistic that they distract me from the ride through the horror.

I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are 'realistic novels,' but they can also be fantastical, so it's nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.

I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors.

I would rather be part of something that is entertaining than realistic.

I would try to write 'realistic' fiction, and someone would fly, or there would be a black hole full of demons or a girl who attracted frogs.

I was very much inspired by the things that I'd seen and done in politics, but I was also desperate for a complete departure from the reality of my political experience. 'It's Classified' and my previous book 'Eighteen Acres' are both works of fiction, but if they do seem realistic, it's by design.

My stories include realistic fiction and fantasy.

I try to write about realistic people doing realistic things. Or as close as I can get, given that I'm trying to write a suspenseful crime novel.

People have told me that the dialogue in '100 Bullets' is very realistic. I don't agree.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

For me that's the magic of the printed page - we don't have to pay attention to the passage of time and focus in on the realities of these characters at a specific age or at a specific time in their lives, and we can play with that to our hearts' content.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.