Quotes About Fiction

Not at all," said Mrs. Oliver. "Least likely person. It seems to work out in real life just the same as in books.

One would know better nowadays," he said, "owing to the prevalence of detective fiction. Every street boy knows that a body must be left where it is found. But in these days we had not the same knowledge, and accordingly we carried the body

Secret Service, I suppose," said Mrs. Oliver. "You can't tell me so, I know, but he wouldn't have been asked otherwise this evening. The four murderers and the four sleuths - Scotland Yard. Secret Service. Private. Fiction. A clever idea.

When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.

I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses.

So the next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

My first novel, 'When You Were Mine,' was a very, very personal story and drew a lot on the people in my life and the relationships that I had.

I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

I had a conversation with a biologist in an art gallery, and he persuaded me that it was possible to grow a dress from microbes. It was the craziest thing I had ever heard, but I'm a bit of a science fiction fan and I thought it sounded like an interesting challenge.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally.

I like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Richard Yates.

I love to learn, and at some level, there's something to learn from my books. And I love art and philosophy, so there's something philosophical about my fiction.

I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist.

We physicists don't like to admit it, but some of us are closet science fiction fans. We hate to admit it because it sounds undignified. But when we were children, that's when we got interested in science, for a lot of us.

The first rule of world-building is available physics, which basically means that if you want it to feel real, it has to follow the same rules as this world, from gravity to how human behaviour works. If you have a fantasy element that doesn't obey the laws of physics, make sure that it has a fantasy explanation.

I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.

It's too easy to unconsciously echo another novelist's voice while reading fiction, a habit of mimicry I probably picked up as a musician.