Quotes About Fiction

The documentaries I made were never normal documentaries. They were about subjects I was obsessed with, and I suppose I thought I could sculpt them. What I think I do with my fiction is the same.

Maybe entertainment is not supposed to be reality.

It's supposed to be entertainment. It's not supposed to be a documentary.

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

When you put your characters in a dire situation, they often do things that surprise even you, so you have to go back and revise your original conception of who they are.

It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

When I began to write, I was surprised at how little London had been used in crime fiction. Places such as Edinburgh or Oxford or L.A. seemed to have stronger identities.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

When I first heard the 'Urumi' script, I was surprised, shocked, and excited. It was a strong script with a reference to the past. It had fact mixed with fiction. To incorporate facts into a film and introduce fictional characters was interesting. I loved the script.

The characters in a novel are made up, figments of the writer's imagination. I'm sure this won't come as a surprise to anyone, and it's not surprising to me either, but knowing this, feeling this, definitely made writing my second book harder.

If there's one thing that television doesn't really do, and has never really done, is to tell a surreal story.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best for writing fiction.

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. (Letter, April 19, 1951)

A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of.

Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

They don't have gangsters in Bay City. They're all working in pictures.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.

Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development.

Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark.

Where does a story begin? The fiction is that they do, and end, rather than that the stuff of a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it

Woolf liberates the text, the imagination, the fictional character, and then demands that liberty for ourselves, most particularly for women.