Quotes About Fiction

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.

In college, I'd gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn't fit in. And I started writing fiction, at least in part, because it was a way to feel like I was around people, to feel the energy and hum of others' inner lives, without the real-time frustrations and difficulties of actual relationships.

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

As a writer of fiction, you don't ever want to limit the characters you create to the life you've lived. That's insanity to me.

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can't be forced. I see no need to write about anything else or any other type of world.

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.

I think Douglas was a real one-off. He was so clever and so intelligent and so well read in real science that he could make science fiction work as well as it did. And just such fun to have around, he was just such a lovely man.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

The comedy and character interaction on 'Atlantis' is what makes it so different from most science fiction shows.

Women just make interesting characters, especially when you're working against cliches.

My interests were in fantasy more than comics growing up.

For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.

And so another season passed, and I hadn't seen Brian, yet another terrible tangle with Peter went by, and anyone who loved me I avoided like the plague. Can things get worse? I kept wondering, and surprisingly, they did. Until finally I read this book by Fay Weldon, and she talks about a woman married to a depressed man and explains there's nothing you (i.e., women) can do about them. And fiction got through to me where facts had feared to tread.

Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip, so if you're reading this at all then you might as well read my private asides written so he'll read it. I have to be extremely funny and wonderful around him just to get his attention at all and it's a shame to let it all go for one person.

She'd missed lunch, and was still trying to pretend that that was a good thing. Of course, her stomach kept up a rumbling running commentary to the contrary

Sometimes I think prostitution and slavery may be the actual subjects of all fiction because of the way fiction exploits its characters.)

Usually plot is to fiction what form is to poetry. It lifts and fills the rambling language and presses it down into a single shape and sound. (85)

I've always told people how important it is to have a plan because, "That's the greatest piece of fiction you will ever write.

My series characters are like family to me. They actually talk to me, telling me what to write and what not to write. And when they talk, I always listen

Ma, se riprendeva a leggere romanzi, sognava di vivere nell'alta società, di essere corteggiata, di essere amata; e quei desideri la struggevano.

I libri le avevano fatto un gran male, eccitando la sua immaginazione, pascendola di allettanti finzioni, di chimere seducenti; ma oramai era troppo tardi per smettere, il male era già fatto, e nonostante la sua sfiducia, le restava in fondo al cuore inassopito il bisogno di commozioni, di scosse, di palpiti.