Quotes About Fiction

Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances!

Press is basically a created story. It's all just stories.

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.

The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.

What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.

Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.

I don't think movies or television have any basis in reality at all. It's all just pretend. That's what's fun about it.

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I like being someone else. 'A Prince' is not about me, but I can pretend for the three minutes of the track. It's great being able to do that, 'cos I enjoy telling stories.

Some people just want to make up the funny things and play pretend.

I love pretending more than reality.

Can you explore real issues as a fake character? Yes - it's called acting. Or fiction. But acting is not a method of engaging with the actual world, just as pretending to know what a character might eat does not a novel make - much less make that make-believe real.

If you're going to read a Peretti book, you're going to get a message. But the book is a pretty good read.

I don't flinch from darkness, but I've always been bothered by what I call gore-nography.

I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.

I don't see myself as an artist, as a writer. The sort of writing that I do, which is popular fiction, it's work. I have contracts to fulfil, and I have deadlines to meet.

As was the case in 'Darth Plagueis' - even going back as far as 'Cloak of Deception' - I was well aware that I was writing what used to be called 'men's adventure' fiction.

Comics and animation have some of the deepest stories I've ever seen.

Horror is a part of science fiction. It belongs in the definition of sci-fi.

I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.

I'm always reading several books at the same time, depending on how deeply engrossed in it I am, if it's fiction and if it captures me.