Quotes About Fiction

Wasn't this the point Juan Diego had made repeatedly? Women readers kept fiction alive—here was another one. When Juan Diego had used Spanish in crying out the scholastic's name, the Chinese girl knew she'd been right about who he was.

Women readers kept fiction alive—here was another one.

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.

It's not like writing a novel. It's easy to know the future when I'm making up the story.

I'm a little sensitive to the subject of the deaths of aunts in my novels. Unkind critics have complained how I dispatch, or dispose of, the unlikable aunts in my fiction, but these critics never knew Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha. Any deus ex machina device would not be too improbable for them.)

While Christopher Pike loved old Westerns, he'd also sampled stories set in other times. He'd noticed something: even as technological progress improved the lives of fictional characters, it had made the jobs of the storytellers who created them more difficult.

Defoe's Moll Flanders, Fielding's Tom Jones and Johnson's moralizing fable, Rasselas.

Norman Maclean called A River Runs Through It fiction, and the word "fiction" appeared in the book's front matter. A River Runs Through It was autobiographical fact in nearly all aspects but one. For private reasons, the author had shifted the site of his brother's murder and, being Norman Maclean, considered that change and others quite enough fabrication to disqualify the text as nonfiction.

I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.

Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.

This is important. Money on its most basic level is a hard fact - you either have it or you don't. But on it's emotional level it is purely a fiction. It becomes what you let it become.

Emotional truths can sometimes be conveyed more effectively, more compellingly, through fiction.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience.

I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

In fiction, the actions of a villain, even when unspeakable, can be cathartic to read about. They let us experience darkness, but add a safe remove.

That's the wonderful thing about drama and writing and fiction: it's this wonderful shared experience that we all have. We can see into each other's lives.

I've always written stuff based on personal experience, but I've always disguised it by the use of characters.

It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.

my experience as a fiction writer tells me that the deeper I look into myself, the more universal is the experience I find there.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.