Quotes About Fiction

The great liberation of imaginative writing is that you're not held back by the facts.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.

If you write any kind of fiction about America, you immediately have to start doing some research about guns, so in some ways, 'Gun Machine' is just the culmination of 20 years of reading about guns.

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.

Certainly for me, as an astrobiologist, science fiction has played an important role. One of the quandaries of our field is that we are trying to study and search for something - life - that we can't define in a rigorous way. We only have one example of a biosphere, so we can't really give a good definition.

SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.

I was really impressed by '2312.'

Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.

One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

In fact, I don't watch any fiction shows.

Most of my stories have some basis in fact.

If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.

It's important to not marginalize any people group in fiction. A complete, authentic-feeling world should include many different elements of life and culture. For this reason, my books will almost always contain people of faith.

'The Hobbit' didn't include female characters at all and was a very linear story, a book for children, really.

George Martin is an incredible writer.

It's horrid to be called a Shakespearean actor because that's incredibly limiting, and we love acting. We like telling stories; anything that excites us we want to be a part of. Science fiction is fun, too!

I am indeed a fan of John le Carre's novels.

remember: not all that is fiction is fictional, and not all that is true is transparent.