Quotes About Fiction

The way I write is that, every time I reintroduced a character, I'd have to face some kind of inner demon.

The only time I ever met a character that I wrote was when I met Ian McKellan, when he was playing Magneto in the 'X-Men' movies.

I read fiction all the time. It's true that I don't like fantasy or science fiction. I like "realistic" novels, particularly those in which nothing much ever happens.

I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.

I think people who live in the worlds that movies are based on end up disliking them. Unless they're from a different time and era.

I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

It's against reason, " said Filby."What reason?" said the Time Traveller.

If you think that you can outrun time, you must be thinking fiction.

I'm in love with fiction. A fantasy that slips between my fingers when reality sets in.

It's 1am, I have fiction to write!

In a great many stories that deal with time travel, there's usually somebody who knows how time travel works. They lay out the rules.

I'm obsessed with Nicholas Sparks. I've literally read every single book, because every time I travel, at the airport, I always buy a new Nicholas Sparks book.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

Partition is after all only an old fortress of crumbled masonry - held together with the plaster of fiction.

You must not look for a grand romance, you know, however much you always enjoy it between the pages of a book.

So much of what he knew about religion struck him as total bullshit; he was disarmed when the fathers freely admitted that some stories were in fact pious fictions. But, judging his character, they dared him to cut through what he called the crap: to find the core of truth, carefully preserved and offered

When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.

I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.

21: CIVIL WAR ON SUNDAY #22: REVOLUTIONARY WAR ON WEDNESDAY #23: TWISTER ON TUESDAY #24: EARTHQUAKE IN THE EARLY MORNING

I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.

My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.

I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever by my lot; but I was not confided to my own identify, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age than my own sensations.