Quotes About Fiction

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of coarse you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called "storytelling." Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story  . . . . to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

But storytelling always changes time. At least it does in my world.

Stories take a person away. If they're good ones, that is.

If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I'm going to kill myself, because I won't know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do.

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

I'm often asked if I think the beginning writer of fiction can benefit from writing classes or seminars. The people who ask are, all too often, looking for a magic bullet or a secret ingredient or possibly Dumbo's magic feather, none of which can be found in classrooms or at writing retreats, no matter how enticing the brochures may be.

Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.

Time-travelers lie a lot.

Keeping up the fiction. You have to keep it up, sometimes, no matter how you feel.

When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren't a character in some writer's story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe's head, or a momentary mote in God's eye?

Even after a thousand pages we don't want to leave the world the writer has made for us, or the make-believe people who live there.

The devil was unpredictable. He had been an angel once.

Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad.

Of course, the writer can impose control; It's just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called plotting. Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however... that is called storytelling. Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

Hicks was examining the paperbacks Maura had culled from the shelves: Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Joe Hill.

Never trust anything a fiction writer says about himself.

Because it makes me happy when the words fall together and the picture comes and the make-believe people do things that delight me. But it's better with you, Constant Reader. Always better with you.

The thought that grieving for a fictional character was absurd did more than cross his mind during his tossings and turnings. For grieving was exactly what he was doing, of course.

Fiction opens a window of imagination that reality closes.

How beautiful would history have been if it could be written beforehand and then acted out like drama!

Reading and writing is an escape for me. Where I can imagine and become who I want to be when I want to be. Where I want to be, it's just a matter of having the imagination to do so!

Reality is what we tell to go screw itself every time we write or read a book, shoot or watch a movie.