Quotes About Fiction

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

The odd thing about being a writer is you do tend to lose yourself in your books. Sometimes it seems like real life is flickering by and you're hardly a part of it. You remember the events in your books better than you remember the events that actually took place when you were writing them.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

We live in our tales of ourselves. . . and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls. . .

Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!

She was of an age that took other people's lives to be pretty fictions, useful merely for adorning the invisible membrane that contained her own singular and glorious existence.

I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of--I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters--I live and breathe them.

One thinks of nothing,' he continued; 'the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

It is a delicious thing to write, whether well or badly - to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.