Quotes About Fiction

The distinction between reality and fiction in America seems like it is becoming really blurry. With its religious fanaticism, reality TV programs and fake news broadcasts being aired by the government, the States feel like they are entering the Dark Ages.

I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on.

Many Americans are eagerly watching the devolution of traditional news with relish because they agree with the prevailing narratives, whether based on true facts or imagined fiction.

My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books.

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

When you start writing fiction, you have to learn to invent, and it's very hard at the beginning to stop relying on facts and what you've heard.

I'm able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are.

My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

Darcy, the heroine of 'Something Blue,' is quite shallow and opinionated. At one point, she commented that she dislikes 'gingers,' i.e., men with red hair. I received several emails from fiery redheads who said they were offended by 'my' comments. I had to remind them that it is fiction.

A lot of the time, when I find myself critiquing scientific accuracy in movies, I have to remind myself that it had to get close enough to getting it right to get things wrong.

Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

As a kid, I loved the idea of alternate possibilities, roads not taken, that sort of thing - and I think seeing the 'Adventure Time' universe rendered by the artists in those stories will scratch that same itch really well.

While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me.

You cannot get PTSD from reading a book or from hearing a story, even repeated stories over and over.

The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.

The only thing that I find repetitive is the number of marriages I have arranged in films. That is one thing I stay away from in real life.

Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.

But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.

I've always been a sci-fi/fantasy guy. My book reports in school, whenever you didn't have to do it on Shakespeare, I did it on, like, Piers Anthony and Raymond Feist.

It was very, very important to me to represent a broader swath of humanity that often isn't seen in futuristic sci-fi.