Quotes About Fiction

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people.

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, visions of ourselves that we would never see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again.

To suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual; and, therefore, though in reality he should happen not to regard him with interest, it is one of the fictions of courtesy to presume that he does.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

A public is a necessary fiction.

Everyone needs a fantasy.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

I'm a neurotic fiction writer who'd like to be a cowboy.

I hate the crazy, neurotic characters beyond a certain point.

Facts are facts, and fiction is fiction, and a lie doesn't become truth just because it appears on the front page of the newspaper.

In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction.

Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don't want to go.

I discovered that there was no difference between playing a real-life character and a fictional one.

I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens) In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In David Copperfield, David's bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop.

I'm equally sure, however, that I won't walk into a lamp-post while reading {literature}, like I did with {a legal thriller} all those years ago; you don't walk into lamp-posts when you're reading literary novels, do you?

Every person I have a conversation with now runs a chance of being fictionalized.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative." From

I can't understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.

Or, as E. L. Doctorow once wrote, far more succinctly "I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.