Quotes About Fiction

We all live our lives from the inside of our bodies out, not from the outside in. Which is why fiction has the texture that it does.

that most embarrassing of statistical fictions, the commercial reader (not you, of course; not me), who presumably consumes texts only for story, is assumed to stand deaf to style, and is thought to applaud only the endlessly repeated pornographies of action and passion that, for all their violences, still manage to pander to an astonishingly untroubled acceptance of the personal and political status quo.

The history of science fiction tends to be the history of its editors.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.

Thomas B. Costain, Herman Wouk, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kenneth Roberts, Edna Ferber, Sholem Asch, Ben Ames Williams, Frederic Wakeman, Frances Parkinson Keyes, Irwin Shaw, Budd Schulberg, Hamilton Basso, and, of course, Samuel Shellabarger.

while the world became the something else of dreams, of books, of Kate.

When I was 12 I cried to my mom, because I never got my letter to Hogwarts.

The lie that started it all.

sometimes lies are more interesting than the truth

Truth is stranger than fiction, after all.

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.

You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.

Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.

I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job.

He prefers his adventures second hand.

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

let's get our semantics straight. Story does not equal fiction, much less "lies." It's the world we Christians inhabit as "people of the Book." We are story people. All

Stephen King, The Gunslinger