Quotes About Fiction

It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.

I've seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country, and instead of learning about it through a textbook, I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.

The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic.

I am very interested in that fine line between fiction and reality and between comedy and tragedy - and pushing the line as much as possible.

Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.

Life is not a piece of tragic fiction in which, at the end of the reading, we all get up and go out for drinks.

I'm trained in the theater, and acting, for me, is about the imaginative life I create for myself, not about basing it on something real. I think that whatever I create becomes the reality for the audience.

The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.

In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory.

Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication.

I know I'm not creating transcendent works that will someday be taught in college. All I do is entertain. I try to entertain others by sending them into another world for a few hours. When I see my books read on the beach, the pages dabbed with suntan lotion, then I feel as if I've done my job.

We have all seen werewolf transformations hundreds of times on screen.

As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their 'subjects' and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn't by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.

'Transformers: The Last Knight' is a different kind of movie.

To be honest, I'm not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.

Actors don't have to be linked in real life for the chemistry to be translated on screen.

My translation work has been pretty separate from my fiction, as it was basically an accidental side project that turned into a separate and parallel career.

I think fiction is important because it has the power to transport a reader into another life.

What I want in a good beach read is sunshine, drama, easy-reading and transportation to another world and other people's problems.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

So you know that TV shit ain't real.

A novel is like a car—it won't go anywhere until you turn on the engine. The "engine" of both fiction and nonfiction is the point at which the reader makes the decision not to put the book down. The engine should start in the first three pages, the closer to the top of page one the better.

People who are exactly like other people probably don't exist. But people who seem like most other people litter our lives, and we don't usually seek their company because they are boring. Readers don't read novels in order to experience the boredom they often experience in life. They want to meet interesting people, extraordinary people, preferably people different from anyone they've met before in or out of fiction.