Quotes About Fiction

The hardest part about writing fiction is finding long stretches of time to do it: for me, this means writing mostly on Saturdays and Sundays. But I am always thinking about my characters, jotting down ideas in stolen moments and hoping I'll be able to make sense of them when the weekend rolls around.

For escape, I love popcorn thrillers that you can read in a weekend, like 'Sharp Objects' and 'The Woman in Cabin 10.'

I think you can get away with being a bit more political in science fiction.

Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.

I'll never understand why people somehow support pollution. It's completely irrational, and I don't get it. Somewhere along the line, they bought into this fiction that one has to choose between the environment and business, which is just a complete falsehood and absurd.

Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.

I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.

Contemporary fiction is the hardest for me because I am not really in the popular culture - I don't watch TV.

I'm a big believer that sci-fi lives in literature, that the true sci-fi population is out there reading a gazillion authors.

The idea that, you know - when I was growing up - that everybody would carry around a portable communicating device, that was science fiction when I was a kid.

I love what I do, but it occurs to me I may have handed over a large portion of my life to fiction.

Although this is a fictitious story the history is real. You don't want to re-write history but you certainly want to portray events and characters as realistically as you can.

I've always had a real interest in the way that science fiction can portray a world that could be different to our world, which I find a really exciting thought.

I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.

We, as a culture, use television as at least one of the great arbiters of truth. Even though we know it's fiction, when we see it portrayed, we believe it. We recognize it as part of our culture.

I like thinking about what could be out there, and I love the questions that sci-fi poses.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

We writers of series fiction tend to idealize ourselves in our characters, giving them attributes we wish we possessed and ever more interesting lives.

Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.

A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.