Quotes About Fiction

The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it's 'plausibly surreal' - it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation.

It's true that my stories seem to deal with the end of the world. I've often been called the high priest of gothic miserablism, which is slightly unfair.

The international community lies at the center of the Obama foreign policy. Unfortunately, it is a fiction. There is no such thing. Different countries have different histories, geographies, necessities, and interests. There's no natural, inherent, or enduring international community.

Writers are highly resistant to reality. Just as well or the human condition would go undocumented.

Fear of failure is fiction, face this fact and fear will fall.

Good fiction writers have an instinctive understanding of human nature. That's what makes stories and characters captivating. Good spiritual writers share what they sincerely practice themselves.

Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction.

Sometimes, authors' descriptions of unique fictional characters are like mirrors that reflect the readers image back.

The statement I wanted to make was that it makes no sense to put these real-life women into one limited template, so why then are we doing it to our fictitious heroines?

I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.

Aren't most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women.

Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.

The end of 'Hollow City' left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that's just where 'Library of Souls' begins.

At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

In 'Property,' none of the characters are based on any real people, but the house is very much the house that I moved into in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Both Springsteen and Michael Jackson, who had these huge productions, could always scale them back down to just a song and a melody. All of that influences me. I also try to be a fictional writer, and sometimes I get close, but the things that resonate the most with me - and with everyone else - is what's real.

I invented the historical spy novel.

I like to take certain aspects of genre fiction and modify them in my own way. 'Your Republic Is Calling You' follows the form of a spy novel, but it leads readers into a world of Kafkaesque irrationality.

I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.

I was Gerti Giggles in 'Spy Kids.'

Former CIA employee Joseph Weisberg's 'An Ordinary Spy' may attract attention for how much it redacts - whether by authorial choice or by CIA design - but its power comes from the growing frustration Weisberg's fictional alter ego feels at a system designed to betray seeming innocents in the most casual and cruel manner possible.

I've got a stack of the 'Walking Dead' comic books next to my bed here.

Furthermore, even if ideas were gettable - say, stacked in a secluded cave like the Dead Sea scrolls - I wouldn't go there. An 'idea,' especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction.