Quotes About Fiction

I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.

Science fiction writers and thriller writers and traditional so-called 'literary' novelists are all novelists, and they finally have to be judged on how good they are, not on which category they belong in.

I sighed and put Slayer between the front seats. Stay here. Guard the car. Saiman shut the door. Is the sword sentient? No. But I like to pretend it is.

When I was a young man in school, I used to read science fiction and really liked it. And as I became a young artist, I was filling up my portfolio with alien planets and spacecraft and things like that.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

I'd always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s as substitutes for experience.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

In the crime fiction section, you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from and speaks to you about your life - or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way.

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.

It was a tricky part to play, because Herriot is both a fictional character and a real person.

Seeks painted trifles and fantastic toys, and eagerly pursues imaginary joys.

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'

For bedtime reading, I usually curl up with a good monograph on quantum physics or string theory, my specialty. But since I was a child, I have been fascinated by science fiction. My all-time favorite is 'The Foundation Trilogy,' by Isaac Asimov.

What Christopher Nolan and I have done with 'Superman' is try to bring the same naturalistic approach that we adopted for the 'Batman' trilogy. We always had a naturalistic approach; we want our stories to be rooted in reality, like they could happen in the same world we live in.

Nowadays it seems as though people sit down to write what they know is going to be a trilogy.

If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.

I'm not saying 'The Godfather' trilogy was bad - because it was brilliant - but that was fiction. It was based on reality.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don't have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.