Quotes About Fiction

Don't you understand?" he would say, "You imagine the story better than I remember it.

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

MADE FOR TELEVISION.

A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.

The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.

That's okay, I said. We're writers. We make things up.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. ''I lost one, too,'' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.

Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.

A book feels true when it feels true, she said to him, impatiently. A book's true when you can say, 'Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.

Real life is too sloppy a model for good fiction," Juan Diego had said.

Readers vary, when it comes to having the imagination to enjoy a story outside their own experiences.

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.

Like any good novel, it lulled him into an almost tranquil state of awareness before it jolted him - it caught him completely by surprise.

Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean?

I just don't dare to make up everything, like you do." I don't make up everything, but when I use things that actually happened, I always change something; I try to make what happens not exactly true.

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.

Reading good novels can make young readers seem more experienced about relationships than they are.

Reading good novels can make almost anything seem imaginable

Escribió que la peor razón para que algo ocurriera en una novela era que hubiera ocurrido realmente. "¡Todo ha ocurrido realmente, alguna vez!", rabiaba. "La única razón para que algo ocurra es que es perfecto que ocurra en ese momento". -Dime cualquier cosa que te haya ocurrido a ti- dijo en cierta ocasión a una entrevistadora- y yo lo mejoraré. Puedo mostrar los detalles mejor que como ocurrieron.

There's a reason we're fiction writers, you know—real life sucks; make-believe is our business," I try to tell her.

the memoir-novel "dumbed down fiction and traduced

Autobiography just isn't good or bad enough to work as fiction… Unrevised, real life is just a mess.