Quotes About Fiction

When I was a child, I loved making stories, so I thought maybe I would be a novelist.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

Novelists lie for a living - what is a novel, after all, but an assembly of fibs paradoxically meant to illustrate something true? - but generally see a distinction between lying on the page and lying off it.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

I don't very often read novels.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

I've read every single fantasy novel there is. I mean, I would challenge a lot of people to read more fantasy novels than I have.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.

All of my novels are democracies.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.