Quotes About Fiction

The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. [...] In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible.

People who do not understand irony cannot understand fiction.

It's always difficult when people compare me unfavorably with other contemporary writers. It's much easier when they use examples from earlier eras of fiction. Because then I can say, Well, I may not be talented, but at least I'm not DEAD.

And what about lovers, like in the stories? Do they get married?" "Oh, yes. And sometimes they stay in love, but sometimes they don't. I would say it's one of the more untrustworthy reasons for marriage.

You can go anywhere in a book. Be anyone. And life has to make sense in a book. Real life doesn't have to make sense. In real life good people can turn out to be bad people, and bad people can get away with murder...and worse. I'll take a good book over that any day.

If Cape wasn't your last name, what was your real one? I asked, deathly curious now. Ahhhh, he complained. Pincas Huckleburr.

You are a bloody-minded savage. I hope you are kidnapped by centaurs.

I am no Othello, Othello was a lie.

Like all of my fictions, Sinner is a mirror. Look into it and you will find yourself. What you do with what you see is your choice.

I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

And she did. But that, dear reader, is another story . . .

Most of us live in two worlds -- our real world and the one we build or spin for ourselves out of the books we read, the heroes we admire, the things we hope to do.

Books had always been a comfort to me, an escape from reality when reality got to be too real.

But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out. For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress.

Tout ce qu'on introduit dans un roman devient signe.

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

Por razones obvias habré sido el primero en descubrir que este libro no solamente no parece lo que quiere sino que con frecuencia parece lo que no quiere, y así los propugnadores de la realidad en la literatura lo van a encontrar más bien fantástico mientras que los encaramados en la literatura de ficción deplorarán su deliberado contubernio con la historia de nuestros días.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a bady's beshattered diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.

I have 20 000 girlfriends, all around the world.

I believe it's incredibly important to write against [racial] stereotypes. If we give in and make sure that all black women characters are asexual, gentle, and kind we wind up with another set of stereotypes.

And yes, I confess, when I looked at him, I thought of Heathcliff and Mr Rochester and Maxim de Winter... and how could I not, when I had been waiting for them to step out of the pages of the books I loved; when I knew them so well, read them inside out and into myself?

Life is a cracked surface at best. Fiction is a nice edifice. / every word/sentence/paragraph gives a writer an opportunity to reinforce or deliberately crack the edifice by screwing with meaning, structure, grammar, the fourth wall, etc. / different types and degrees of cracking produce different arrangements of order and chaos.

Ohnehin waren die wenigsten Romanfiguren so detailliert beschrieben, dass Leser und Autor dasselbe Bild vor Augen hatten.