Quotes About Fiction

I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library - I'm a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction - so I'll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I'll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast.

The fictionally correct have all the answers, and that's what's wrong with them. They're artistic technocrats. There's no dilemma so knotty, no question so baffling, that it can't be smoothly neutralized by dialing up the right attitude adjustment. Poor old Hemingway. If only he'd known.

Conflict drives fiction; no one wants to read a four-hundred-page novel in which everything rolls along smoothly.

Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private.

I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.

It's been amazing to play a character that's known by so many people, especially because everyone knows at least something about Peter Pan.

So many people think that if you're writing fantasy, it means you can just make everything up as you go. Want to add a dragon? Add a dragon! Want some magic? Throw it in. But the thing is, regardless of whether you're dealing with realism or fantasy, every world has rules. Make sure to establish a natural order.

'Modelland' has always been a part of my mind and my heart. I'm excited that you'll be able to read about this magical world that's been living in my dreams for so many years.

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

Writing Kylo Ren is just so much fun.

That's what has been so much fun about the whole creative process. You can make your characters have adventures that you haven't had and might wish to have.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

My goal is to write one book of fiction, and that's all I want to do. It takes so much time, and I don't really have enough time. But I admire writers so much.

Once I've properly finished a book, my ideal state of being would be to never think about it again. But with 'Capital,' I felt I'd spent so much time with the characters that they were very, very real, and I definitely had a sense of loss about leaving them behind in a way I've not quite had before.

Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.

Surrealism also refuses the representation of reality: reality can only be; its existence proves its reality. Fiction thereby becomes impossible or is, by definition, false.

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

Confession: I don't want to be one of my characters. I'm mean to them sometimes. Really mean.

I heart my job. I get to make things up for a living.

As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163

To make Harry Potter invisible, one would have to liquefy him, boil him to create steam, crystallize him, heat him again, and the cool him, all of which would be quite difficult to accomplish, even for a wizard

So the scale law rules out the familiar idea of worlds-within-worlds found in science fiction, that is, the idea that inside the atom there could be an entire universe, or that our galaxy could be an atom in a much larger universe.