Quotes About Fiction

Yes, I enjoyed my share of fantasy fiction series and comics. Among superheroes, Spiderman was my favorite. I always had this fascination for costume-clad vigilante who would come and save the day!

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.

I've seen unpublished manuscripts where the writer doesn't know they are making fun of the villain - but they are. If you aren't afraid of your villain, how can your hero be afraid?

It is much more fun to write about villains then heroes. The villains are the ones that think out the scheme, and the heroes just kind of come along for the ride.

The DC Universe has the best villains in fiction, right? I don't think there's any group of villains collectively or anywhere else that come close to DC's. Joker, Cat Woman, Lex Luthor, are all staples. A lot of the comic book icons are fiction icons.

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.

People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed.

I like creating villains.

Both villains and heroes are a bit boring, really, unless they're flawed and broken somehow. If they're not flawed and broken, then clearly they need to be broken and made flawed. That's what an author does if he or she has any dignity.

I feel the best villains are the ones you have feelings for.

As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice. You see a lot of people who should have been punished and are not, and people who were punished wrongfully are not vindicated. Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.

I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader.

Yes, he wanted me to do Funny Games before, which I didn't want to do because the film was very theoretical - the way people experience violence on screen. There was very little space for fiction, it was more like a sacrifice for the actors than anything else.

I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

There is still a funny notion that women should not write violent fiction.

It started getting too crazy with 'Earth A.D.' The concepts started becoming too brutal and violent. It was less about fiction and more about the real world, the past, present, and future. I think a lot of people got freaked out by that.

Number one, as an audience member, I tend to like violent movies and TV shows because it's not real.

Virtual reality, all the A.I. work we do, all the robotics work we do - we're as close to realizing science fiction as it gets.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.

'24' and 20th Century Fox and Sky TV are not responsible for training the U.S. military. It is not our job to do. To me, this is almost as absurd as saying, 'The Sopranos' supports the mafia, and by virtue of that, HBO supports the mafia.'

Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from the circumstances of their creation, and even apart from the intentions of their creator.

There is nothing nicer than playing someone who is cooler, tougher, more virtuous and sexier than yourself and thinking, 'I can be anyone.'

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.