Quotes About Fiction

With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.

I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.

A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

The events of the Civil War are so odd, ferocious, and poignant that fictional characters do well simply to inhabit them.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

I read a lot of sci-fi when I was younger. Loved it from the literary point of view.

As a friend once pointed out, the crotchety dowagers do tend to get all the best lines. That may be why I have so many of them in my books.

I was reading C.S. Lewis with my mom, and she was pointing out that he was dead, and I'm like, 'What do you mean he's dead?' We were in this world he created, and he was gone from the Earth. Yet in those black marks on a white page, his imagination lived on, his voice lived on. That is so miraculous.

I think of fiction as the highest calling. I'm kind of addicted to it. It's the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life.

Everybody claims they have relatable, connectable characters, but those claims often aren't true.

Poirot is a classic character from fiction, not a MacBook Air; he would not benefit from updates.

This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing.

This sounds like a cliche, but I always wanted to write. After college, I did some writing and realized very quickly that it's hard to make a living as a writer. At that point, I was more interested in fiction writing.

There are trappings of science fiction which I kind of embrace, but there are also cliches which I run from.

A lot of the joke of 'The Windsors' is this ridiculous idea of what might happen behind closed doors.

I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'

I collect and read as many books about music and film as I do fiction.

My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

I read anything and everything. Comfort food for my brain is fantasy fiction or science fiction.

I'm not a comic book guy at all.

I grew up raiding my brother's comic book stash. I tried to lose myself in fiction.