Quotes About Fiction

Neal Stephenson

What's it like working for Mr. Freeze?" "I was going to say the Penguin," Dinah said, "but people in Seattle don't carry umbrellas.

Neal Stephenson

pauses for a moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer.

The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. 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.

nodded, "A lot of our perception of history is influenced by inaccurate movies.

Sou um menino que vê o amor pelo buraco da fechadura. Nunca fui outra coisa. Nasci menino, hei de morrer menino. E o buraco da fechadura é, realmente, a minha ótica de ficcionista. Sou (e sempre fui) um anjo pornográfico

I do not use profanity in my novels. My characters all go to church.

write what readers want to read, which isn't necessarily what you want to write.

I've loved mountains since I was a girl, and when I discovered mountaineering fiction after college, I was hooked.

After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.

I've devoted a lot of my time and effort during the past few years to developing my advertising copywriting business to the point of where I can support my family and don't have to depend on writing fiction for my income.

People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

I like feel-good fiction and mysteries.

They've also asked me now to start on another series that we're gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it's not science fiction, it's more in the Mystery and Crime division and that's another area I'm very interested in.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

Mystery fiction was considered a stepchild of literature.

I think horror or science fiction is another way of telling a modern myth - it's like Ancient Greece; it's like kids couldn't wait for the next 'Orpheus' story, the next 'Jason and the Argonauts.'

There are not so many mythical creatures from Inkheart.

Of course it's fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who've never met me, who don't know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he's just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was.

I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.

Yes, Charles Yu names his main character after himself. That main character, in fact, is both time-machine repairman and author of a book called 'How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.'