Quotes About Fiction

I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me.

I ventured into fiction in 1988 with 'What Love Sees,' a biographical novel of a woman's unwavering determination to lead a full life despite blindness.

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.

I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.

When I was young and easily outraged, I would be upset when every fictional character I created was somehow reduced to 'autobiography.'

If people call my book an actor's memoir I will be very upset. I can't bear anything too literal, so it has elements of truth and elements of fiction sitting side by side.

I always take a story that's kind of out there, like an urban myth. I take some possibility that people imagine, that they are familiar with, and try to turn it into a story.

Being a writer means you get to live vicariously through your characters

Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but it's through the back door.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

Simply put, Redeeming Love is the most powerful work of fiction you will ever read.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

A large part of acting is just pretending. You get to work with these other great make-believers, all making believe as hard as they can.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

The thing I do at the beginning is a "voice journal," a free form doc that is the character speaking to me. I just work on it until I start to hear different from my own, or the other characters.

Fact is only what you believe and fact and fiction work as a team.

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.