Quotes About Fiction

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release?

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth?

Great fiction tells unknown truths.

all we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character--what we believe--none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

I never killed anyone. I avoid going over that edge by writing about a guy who has taken a flying leap over it.

Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconcile, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willingfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, 'Listen to me'.

Even a novel drawn from reality, faithful to it, is not the truth, just as the image in the mirror is not a person in flesh and blood. It remains, that is, an abstraction, no matter how realistic, how close to the facts.

The Brothers Karamazov, and Anna Karenina, and Fathers and Sons.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

As a fiction writer, of course, you need to take some leeway with certain aspects of history to make the story work.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

Most of the history is a divine work of fiction.

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

I believe that I am some sort of fiction writer and I'm using myself in my work because I'm the person I'm most convenient to use!

I love making fiction films as well as nonfiction ones, and hope to keep challenging myself to make better and better work.

Making sure that the geography and timelines work is always the hardest part of writing. But you owe it to the readers to get it right!

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.

In all my documentaries I did all the camera work, but in fiction I didn't want to do it myself. I think the machinery is so heavy and demanding that you would leave the actors alone for a long time.

I can work inside the boundaries of Erika Murphy, or whoever the character is. It's fun to create somebody that's not you, that doesn't exist.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.