Quotes About Fiction

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

in my skimmings over fiction I cannot recall any writer so continuously implicated in his own work as George Moore.

Our lives are fictions, a work we leave behind, signed.

I love to fool my readers, but in a good way. If you've read any of my work, there's a good chance that at some point I surprised you.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.

I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

As a student, I wrote English reports on science fiction.

I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.

I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.

I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.

There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.

By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.

When one studies the properties of atoms, one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction. Particles really do have the possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

For 'Gender Studies,' I wrote that story in May and June of 2016. People have said to me, 'Oh, it's a political allegory,' and I think, 'Sure.' The political stuff is definitely there. But that's why I like fiction; there can be lots of different things going on, and it's all intertwined, and you can't separate out what's in what category.

If you look at American studios, the big productions have nothing to do with reality.

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.

The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

I loved studying the Medieval world; that's why I love 'Game of Thrones.'

For the last few years, I've enjoyed writing my own stuff since studying creative writing at school, and as I've grown up, I've realised how much I enjoy escaping into a world that I've created myself. So I've kept that up as a hobby.