Quotes About Fiction

I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

I've always written short stories.

I like short stories.

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

Eventually, I just want to write wavy little short stories.

I don't even like to show midriff - it's my characters who are always showing midriff.

I know it's a bit of an awful thing to say, but I really just make things up. My main goal is to make a picture that people find interesting to look at and that has my name on it.

I did try to write fiction. I wrote 10 novels. And they were all just awful.

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.

I read almost no romantic fiction, in part because I barely believe in romance in the age of Tinder.

Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived.

But basically, I'm trying to write a fun story.

Nobody loves a good 'Batman' story more than I do.

The only way to write Batman, if you get the chance - and I hope everyone out there gets the chance - is to imagine you made him up.

'The Battle of Dorking' was reprinted as a book and became a best-seller.

Let's be real: It's just TV; it's just entertainment.

When you write scripts, it begins to feel like you're living in them.

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction, when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down, there's nobody there and the restaurant doesn't exist. The restaurant is a horrific, never-ending nothingness. So you make scattershot decisions about what the restaurant might look like and the person you might be sitting with.

Nobody gives a tinker's fuck about fiction any more, not real fiction, and the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness." (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.