Quotes About Fiction

This is my one beef with Hollywood: It's great for movie sales, but they've created this fiction for us that, when you have a hard thing in your life, it's going to get fixed, and then your life will be awesome! Forever!

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.

I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.

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.

Because at bottom, I'm interested in fear, and in courage and cowardice and these are easier to get at through fiction, where you can enter people's heads.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

I hear people talk in my head, and I write it down. I choose where they live and how they dress to be real.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

My mama loved books; I became fascinated by the wonderful stories that came out of these things she held in her hand - and started to make them up myself.

Every man is a hero to his alias.

Ian Rankin's Rebus is the king of modern British crime fiction. He is dour, determined, and constantly falls foul of his seniors. For all this, we root for him. He is eminently loveable, a quixotic hero moving through the darker half of a Jekyll and Hyde Edinburgh.

You mustn't fall in love with your own hero.

A perfect hero is about as boring as a perfect marriage.

I don't really like heroes who always behave heroically. That's not interesting to me.

Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.

I like 'Girlhood' because it has this universal feeling, and that's also the project of the film, to bring very contemporaneous characters into the big fiction, and the classical idea of a heroine's emancipation.

In high school and college, I started to read more and write science fiction myself. I was fully engaged in writing in the 1990s.

These aren't the 'droids you're looking for," Kenobi told him pleasantly. "These aren't the 'droids we're looking for.

With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book.