Quotes About Fiction

I seem to long for community and mistrust it in equal measure, and so I spend most of my days carefully constructing various communities in stories and seeing if they fly.

My favourite character in fiction was probably either James from 'James and the Giant Peach' or Ender from 'Ender's Game.' They were just ordinary people who were living under various amounts of struggle, and just to follow their journeys and see them break out of that and live extraordinary lives - I think that gave me a lot of hope as a kid.

Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.

Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

One of my favorite things about supernatural fiction is its vast array of creatures.

The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.

Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.

I'm not a futurist, and my taste in science fiction was sort of in the gothic horror vein, not space movies and futuristic stuff.

When 'Ally McBeal' started, I went, 'Oh, my God.' It's like what I was doing. 'Bridget Jones' was in the same vein. I identify with all of them.

Domestic realism has dominated the American marketplace for decades now. It leeches into literary fiction, and I don't think it's that rich a vein.

When I was four I joined a group of girls who were talking about their party dresses. I thought they were imagining, so I imagined a fantastic pink velvet dress with lots of jewels. But they were simply describing what they actually wore, and they had utter contempt for my obvious fiction. After that, I never joined a group again.

I read pretty much every 'Venom' comic that exists.

I find it very satisfying to write because you can purge many things and vent what you feel under the mask of fiction.

When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.

To be honest, I wasn't a sci-fi geek at all. But I do love a good sci-fi film, especially one that can really take you away. And I read some reality-bending novels growing up, like stuff by Vonngeut, so I already had one part my brain open to the unnatural and unusual, and it's generally fun to venture into that world and film in it.

The American obsession with 'Downton' amuses me slightly because it's such a fiction. I've always been questioned about my historical veracity, and 'Downton' just flies past, when it's completely made up.

It gives me confidence to know that what I'm writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I'm writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.

Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you're a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.

I started my career as a novelist. 'Veronica Mars' was first imagined as a novel.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.