Quotes About Fiction

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

When you write fiction, you can sort of invent more but also pack it with emotions that are very pertinent to you. Whereas with nonfiction, you have to be as factual as possible but also hopefully - also bring... emotional relevance to the piece.

For me, fiction isn't very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it's a whole different thing - whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily. It can do emotional stuff. But they don't really compare - not for me.

I've never seen a Western that was really truthful. Most are just morality plays. Good guys and bad guys - and the good guys always win, whereas in reality, most of the sheriffs were as bad as the gangsters they were after.

How you solve your problems are quite different. In non-fiction, you can always go back to the research, whereas in fiction, you have to go back to yourself - which is a little bit scary.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

Romance tends to be the whipping boy of genre fiction.

We're about to shoot an episode on Air Force One, for instance, and we're going to take liberties, small liberties, with Air Force One, as we take small liberties with our White House set.

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

I primarily read fiction, and I read a good many wonderful books while writing 'The Visibles.'

It's true that none of my characters are admirable. But maybe I'm primarily a satirist, and a satirist needs to hold up what's not admirable.

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.

Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.

I think printed fiction is what women read.

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.

In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.

Britain can claim to lead the world in murder because it was a country that industrialized early. Other countries, going through the same process later, caught up and produced their own genres of detective fiction.

There's no reason why the 'Lost' alternate reality game had to be officially made by the 'Lost' production crew.

Writing for me is not a premeditated act. It just happens - characters keep coming out of nowhere and doing things I never expected them to do. The most persistent and most productive of these has been Paul Christopher, whom I didn't expect to see again after he appeared in 'The Miernik Dossier.'