Quotes About Fiction

Fiction writing is a kind of magic. If I communicate the magic spell . . . it loses its force for me.

To remain pure a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.

Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid, but the choice of a book presented some difficulties...

Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid

It took me years and years to realize a very simple thing, which is that when you write fiction you're raising questions, and a lot of people think you're playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions. They read your question. They don't know how to answer correctly. And they think that if they could only meet you personally and look into your eyes, you could give them the answers.

I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.

I loved the tales of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. I read widely as a young woman, but always went back to traditional crime fiction for my comfort-reading. If I had a cold or had been dumped by my boyfriend, those were the books I returned to for escape and reassurance.

History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

I decided to write Westerns because there was a terrific market for Westerns in the '50s. There were a lot of pulp magazines, like 'Dime Western' and '10 Story Western' that were still being published. The better ones paid two cents a word. And I thought, 'I like Westerns.'

I like fiction set in the South, and I'm a fan of literary westerns.

It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.

I love the 'what if' nature of sci-fi.

The fantasy that appeals most to people is the kind that's rooted thoroughly in somebody looking around a corner and thinking, 'What if I wandered into this writer's people here?' If you've done your job and made your people and your settings well enough, that adds an extra dimension that you can't buy.

War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.

I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'

I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'

I think that any sort of fantasy or sci fi that is grounded in something that could ostensibly be real - 'Jurassic Park' being my favorite example - is that much more prescient because it means that much more. Maybe one day, what if?

As a writer, you always try to imagine, 'What if I were in a situation like this? How would I react?'

One of the things I love best about Marvel is the 'What If?' factor; being able to just say, 'Today we're going to explore a world where Magneto and Emma never gave back the X-Men. Or a world where Mary Jane shares Peter's powers.' So being able to do that is just super exciting.

I grew up reading a lot of fantasy/sci-fi. It was really all I read - anything from 'Dragonlance,' when I was 12, to 'The Wheel of Time' and Robert Jordan stuff, to George R.R. Martin, who did 'Game of Thrones.'

Whenever you bring reality TV into the mix, it's only a matter of time before, whatever fiction you come up with, it'll become real.

For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

From fiction, you do not get to learn much because it is only imagination. Whereas, from non-fiction, people can understand and learn from the realities it covers.