Quotes About Fiction

I have had an overdose of romantic thrillers.

My intent was to gain experience for fiction I eventually hoped to write. But there's no question I was drawn in by the hope that journalism would be a creative, thrilling environment.

It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.

When we talk about 9/11 and 26/11 - which is the shorthand for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 - we're talking about the most successful terrorist attacks in history. When you start trying to study the most successful event of its kind, it actually doesn't make for great fiction because there isn't the kind of failure in it that fiction thrives on.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!

I think, when you are writing non-fiction, you feel there's an obligation to get it absolutely right, so all your factual details have to be, have, you know, to go through a long list of them and tick them. I'm not saying that's not important in fiction, but I think you have a bit more leeway; you can suit yourself.

Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.

The character - character - of Mallory on 'Family Ties' was a year younger than me. A fictitious year younger than me. So, I am not 21. I am not getting into the club. Boom.

When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.

There's a lot about the character. It doesn't always happen, but there are some characters you really create a relationship with, almost as if they were your friend. And you never get into their heads again or think like them.

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

Here were Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, A Wrinkle in Time, The Outsiders, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights. And over here Anne of Green Gables, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Pride and Prejudice, Island of the Blue Dolphins.

History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other.

I'm the story of Sheresa. I write a little bit of the fiction of me every day.

The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth is not.

The difference between truth and fiction is that the latter must always be credible in order to work.

I can think of no series of words that could appear in a piece of naturalistic fiction that could not also appear in the same order in a piece of speculative fiction. I can, however, think of many series of words that, while fine for speculative fiction, would be meaningless as naturalism. Which then is the major and which the subcategory?