Quotes About Fiction

I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.

There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

An author's ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table - along with a great manuscript - makes a difference in what books get picked up. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction titles. You need to show your publisher what you've got in your marketing arsenal.

I love making up titles.

On a book like 'X-Men,' you have to stay true to the established fiction, working with editors to ensure continuity, sometimes across multiple titles.

I teach a lot of graduate creative writing classes, and on the first day, I like to go around the room and ask everybody what's the last book you've read that you really loved. And all of the women tend to give me chick lit titles. And to me, that's sort of disappointing because it's their only exposure to fiction somehow.

I'm not a big fan of prequels to be honest.

In other people's books, I tend to love the really daredevil-y characters. I love Finnick from 'The Hunger Games.' And I think, probably, my favorite character of all time is Sherlock Holmes.

If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.

My life also prepared me to play T-Dog. That was what my entire life was about - surviving. To be on the set of 'The Walking Dead,' it was like being back home. I had to survive again, though in the fictional world.

My first character was Mr. Toad.

I'm really such a bumbler! Writing fiction is like arranging furniture in a dark room. I can't see what I'm doing. I grope for the right words. I bump against the wrong words and stumble and stub my toe and curse and keep trying to guess what belongs in the space.

'The Hobbit' by J. R. R. Tolkien was the first book I enjoyed. I was 14 and when I finished I started it again.

I don't believe that my first name is Leo or that my last name is Tolstoy. I'm a storyteller.

The trouble with real life is that you don't know whether you're the hero or just some nice chap who gets bumped off in chapter five to show what a rotter the villain is without anyone minding too much.

it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.

Years later Fitzgerald inscribed a copy of Gatsby with what he perceived at the time to be its failings: "Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life. So he's synthetic—and that's one of the flaws of the book.

In fact, Mott had not been forced to believe anything: the willing lies of fiction depend upon willing believers. Like love, belief is an act of volition.

In fiction, characters could punch their bosses and get away with it. In real life, you lost your job, and then you were dining on Cup-a-Soup seven nights a week instead of four.

When she was reading, she didn't just leave her own life behind, she stepped into someone else's.

In fiction, I searched for my favorite authors, women I have trusted to reassure me than not all teenage guys are total ditwads, that the archetype of the noble cute hero who devotes himself to the girl he loves has not gone the way of the rotary phone. That all I had to do was be myself (smart, hardworking, funny) and be patient and kind and he and I would find each other. As Bea would say, this why they call it fiction.

I like liars. Liars care enough to make the world a more interesting place than it actually is.

Good fiction often gives us characters in extremity, which ironically gives us a clearer mirror in which to see ourselves.