Quotes About Fiction

I still think I'm writing Nancy Drew with a mortgage.

I'd always wanted to write crime fiction. I loved Nancy Drew.

At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'

You do get fond of your characters. Handing them on is like giving a child to a nanny.

The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.

Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

I'm not really afraid of things that are imaginary. I enjoy it. I enjoy big narrative, and I enjoy big feelings. Having a feeling is never going to kill you.

I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction.

Crafting a piece of gripping, narrative true crime that engages the world is not that different from crafting a piece of crime fiction.

Biographies never feel as real as the best fiction. There is such a discontinuity between the narrative and the material it comes from, which is always such a mixed bag of letters, recollections, and other data.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.

I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.

There was a hole in Washington fiction, I felt, when I started out. Most D.C. novels were about politics or the federal city or people who lived in Georgetown or Chevy Chase - it was definitely a very narrow focus.

'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.

Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.

I'm not naturally an extrovert. I'm a writer - I sit in a room by myself making things up. That is where I'm happiest.

If you are a vampire, then a vampire is not the creature of the legends.

Gary turned his face away to hide a smile. Vampires seemed to have women problems, too.

We are not the vampires in your horror stories, the walking dead, for God's sake.

Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.

Christopher Moore