Quotes About Fiction

Fiction is organized gossip.

After immersing myself in the mysteries of the Electoral College for a novel I wrote in the '90s, I came away believing that the case for scrapping it is less obvious than I originally thought.

Matthew's all right. Originally, I wanted Errol Flynn, but McConaughey should be good as Dirk Pitt.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

The fact that we die is one of the more interesting things that happen to us. Fiction ought to be about bottom lines, and that's as bottom-line as you can get.

One of the things that doesn't come up as much as it should, especially in literary fiction, is this idea of faith and God... I feel like those are things that should be wrestled with... because they are such an integral part of our community on every level.

Wanted to write fiction since I was 11, since I first read 'In Our Time' by Hemingway.

The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.

Sometimes '24' can seem a little grand. Sometimes these things can seem a little outlandish.

I've always felt more comfortable in fantasy. Fantasy has felt more real to me at times. Drawing was an immediate outlet for that: to create. It's been my ability to create my own world.

I adore Kate Atkinson, her literary as well as her crime output.

There is always over-the-top drama in television.

There's a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.

Perhaps the reason memoirs are so often written by the young these days is that, once you reach a certain age, only fiction might allow you to truly make your way back to childhood.

turn the story into a novel, and we agreed because the characters we'd created for that short story were still hanging around our brains. They had more to say.

Niets is veilig, alles is bruikbaar, de verdraaiingen in zijn memorie, de verzinsels uit zijn buurt, de roddels uit zijn krant, en op den duur lijkt alles maar gebeurd te zijn omdat het hem prima stof oplevert, zelfs de dood van zijn eigen moeder. Wie schrijft is een gier.

Everything, as Peyman said, may be a fiction – but the Future is the biggest shaggy-dog story of all.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

I would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I've gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there's always another perspective.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

God made man because he loves to hear stories, Alessandro said. That's a good story, huh?

Longer metaphors, in the form of stories, allow more sophisticated relationships: […] In planning, the boundaries between myth, history and fiction are not so consequential as one might think.