Quotes About Fiction

I don't write romance novels.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

Sometimes I - I try not to read too many fiction or novels.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.

I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.

I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.

I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.

Fantasy novels, I don't really gravitate to that part of the bookstore.

I'm always in the kitchen, cooking and experimenting - I love it. And every now and then I think, 'I should write a cookbook' or, 'I should write for food magazines.' And then I get drawn back to writing fiction again.

That's what happens in feature docs. The more time you spend, the more nuance emerges, the more a story evolves - but it's different than fiction, where you can reshoot something.

I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.

I don't really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.

Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.