Quotes About Fiction

I'd read the book and liked the book, but it made me really uncomfortable trying to picture myself in this part. Here's this guy who seems to be the embodiment of every single perfect guy.

The magical and fantastical isn't something I'm uncomfortable with in books, and I chafe slightly at the idea that a purely realist novel somehow has more value.

People resist and fight against things that are new that they haven't seen before, especially if they make them uncomfortable. But fiction is a safe place to tell these stories and to reach out to people and maybe affect them and make a difference in their lives.

I read a lot about her. I read a lot of bios. I read bios about the royal family; I read this little novella called 'The Uncommon Reader,' which is a fiction: it's about Queen Elizabeth going on this library bus and choosing books and reading them, but it's so sweet.

But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.

I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.

Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.

In all my books, I try to have a strong element of realism underlying the fantastic.

I'm quite a rational person, but I'm drawn to the irrational. I love coincidences, and I like to question that in fiction: 'Is this random, or is there something working underneath?'

I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

Bitcoin is complex: the entire private and public key issue, the transfers, the mining of bitcoins... but if you tell it as fiction, people would understand and remember.

Left Behind takes what to some people may be unbelievable predictions from the Bible and shows how they might play out. It makes the events of biblical prophecy understandable and thus believable.

No matter what world you're creating, whether it be a real world or a fantasy world, you still have to make the characters relatable or somewhat understandable.

My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.

Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story.

People never understood that there was Brian and The Boz. They were two completely different people.

You feel undervalued when you write the kind of fiction I write.

I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.

I don't think any book of mine will ever come as close to pure fantasy as 'A Heaven of Others.' I'll never again set a book in a world or after-world in which it's impossible to buy a cup of coffee or take an undisturbed afternoon nap.

One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.

The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.