Quotes About Fiction

Can fiction teach us? Absolutely. Fiction has the power to illustrate place, era, and atmosphere in vivid detail. But it is not Anthropology for Dummies.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.

What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.

There are things you can say in the voice of a fictional character that you could not explore any other way.

What I need, as a reader, is a character with a heart and a voice and a pulse. I need a character so vivid and so specific that she doesn't feel like fiction.

I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up.

Print-on-demand publishing is the new farm system for new voices in fiction. Authors who have compelling things to say, who can market their stories in compelling ways, will succeed.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

He always describes his characters' voices and their physique so brilliantly. As people have said, they are cartoons, caricatures. They're grotesques really.

I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.

The idea that we should write towards the unknown aspects of our experience was totally groundbreaking for me. It gave me the license I needed to try to write outside myself. This attitude has deeply informed my approach to fiction, emboldening me to write characters with voices or situations that are vastly different from my own.

Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.

When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books. I was not interested in reading 'The Glass Key' or 'The Maltese Falcon' - stuff that was 40 or 50 years old.

It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that.

All of business and all of politics is essentially fiction to those who live them. I have more experience with fiction than most senators because I do it all day, so their world didn't seem that foreign to me.

I don't know about others, but I am sensitive, and I easily get attached to my characters.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

I don't have sentimental attachments to characters at all.

I wasn't a big science-fiction fan growing up. But I loved Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes. Both came into play on 'The X-Files.'

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.