Quotes About Fiction

The stage is suspension of disbelief. Film is a literal medium.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

What do you know? Haven't you heard of suspension of disbelief?

I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.

The series 'Generation Kill' is, along with everything else, a sustained critique of the structural and conventional fictions of 'The Hurt Locker.'

If you want to start reading Swedish crime fiction, you have to start with Sjowall and Wahloo.

The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.

There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.

'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.

I really can't write fantasy. I cannot invent a world which does not exist. And I can't read fantasy either. As soon as I realise I'm reading a book that hasn't got its roots in a reality I can comprehend, I switch off.

I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.

I feel like Mills and Boon saved my life. It was a way of not living. I read a lot of other books as well, but they were definitely the best for just switching my brain off, not having to deal with reality.

Science fiction without the science just becomes, you know, sword and sorcery, basically stories about heroism and not much more.

Unfortunately, making what is essentially a laser sword falls into the deadly category.

I like 'The Lord of The Rings' and ninja swords.

Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

There's a horrible fallacy that exists in the popular discussion of fiction these days: the idea that a successful central character need be 'likeable' or 'sympathetic'. It is surely more important that they be human, no? More crucial that they breathe?

What really matters, finally, is the big picture, the fictional dream that lingers after the details have vanished. The big picture is formed not only by our descriptions of characters, settings and events but also by forces that reside above and below our story's surface—atmosphere, mood, feeling, motif, theme, form, structure and tone. These terms are far from interchangeable.

I learned to love reading again, but a lot of the time the books made me ache worse. When I was in school I didn't realize that most fiction was about death and regret. About things people wished they had or hadn't said, done or hadn't done and how, for whatever reasons, saying or not saying, doing or not doing had buried them alive. I was already too familiar with that feeling to want to read much more about it. Lately I was sticking to nonfiction.

Ik heb een hekel aan fantastische vertellingen. Sprookjes, dromen, saai-jans-fiction, de hele boel kan me gestolen worden.' 'Waarom, meisje?' 'Het gewone dagelijkse leven is al fantastisch genoeg.' 'Kind, kind,' de juffrouw hief de handen geschrokken ten plafond, 'waar haal je die onzin vandaan! Straks ga je nog zeggen dat de werkelijkheid fantastischer is dan een roman.

Are the stories we tell ourselves true or based on what we dream them to be?

Whatever happens in a romance novel doesn't always have to stay in one.