Quotes About Fiction

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.

In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.

I liked journalism and thought it was important, certainly more important than fiction. I'd probably still be doing it if I hadn't been elbowed out.

It turned out I really didn't like journalism. I wanted to make up stories, not cover real events.

Fiction writing and journalism, in my experience, are really excellent training grounds for each other.

I think grammar teaching should start with real examples of language in use: journalism, fiction, songs, ads, instructions, headlines, transcripts of conversations and so on.

I was never a good journalist, because I would make things up. A lot of people frowned on that, which is why I ended up in fiction.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

Stories let you be the hero, the doctor, the lawyer, the gladiator. They let you go on a journey.

What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.

Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

I tell the truth where it's the ethical thing to do, but in terms of entertainment, there's a certain fun and enjoyment that can be added to the experience by a few judicious lies.

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

Scarface is just a character. He's just something to look at. He's not nothing to be.

Justice is to be found only in imagination.

Science fiction is not a genre that has much respect in China. Critics have long been discouraged from paying attention to the category, dismissed as a branch of juvenile literature.

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

The Ned Kelly is definitely the coolest of all the crime fiction awards, and if you think about it, it's the only one that's given for an entire continent.

When I was a kid, I loved 'Little Women.'

I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.

If 'Game Of Thrones' hadn't been made, I don't think 'The Last Kingdom' would have been, but this is more grounded in real life.