Quotes About Fiction

Even when I write fiction, which I don't do too often, the fictional characters are familiar to me, like relatives I might have had in another life, and the setting is a place I know or have known. If I feel acquainted with the people and the landscape, I can enter this world and imagine what happens there and write it down. For me that world will always be some form of home.

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There was part of me listening that didn't think what I said was fiction. I was making up a true story.

How many of us count fictional characters, or those we've never met, among our closest friends? My hand's up.

There was part of me listening that didn't think what I said was fiction. I was making up a true story.

You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those

El Dios del Viejo Testamento; se puede argumentar, es el carácter más desagradable en toda ficción: celoso y orgulloso de serlo; cerrado de mente, injusto, severo y obsesionado con el control; vengativo, un limpiador étnico sediento de sangre, un misógino, homofóbo, racista, infanticida, genocida, filicida, productor de pestilencias, megalomaníaco, sadomasoquista, caprichoso, y un matón malevolente.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.

Hijacking by pseudoscience and bad science fiction is a threat to our legitimate sense of wonder.

The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here...

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

The best thinking says 'the self' is a fiction (I have a piece about that), yet it's a fiction that we all believe, our most intimate experience. Maybe it's nothing more than our tendency to repeat. Maybe we repeat because when we do, we recognize the behavior and the familiarity is comforting. So the self is just the consolation of our tendencies.

We don't always want to read about everyday things – and that silly stuff is so much fun to parody.

No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?

We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.

It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.