Quotes About Fiction

I'm not good with sci-fi stuff. I'll be in it, as long as I can see what I'm dealing with and know it's fake. As soon as I watch it on TV, though, my brain registers it as 'Everything's real!'

You can fake a lot of stuff, but you can't fake if the story isn't there and if the writing isn't good.

Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.

Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.

The writing that I have found to be most false is the writing that doesn't offer hope.

Father was very sympathetic, and if the hero of a romance was good or to be pitied, his eyes would fill with tears until he could not see.

'Ray Donovan' was all fiction and pure fun, to be working with such greats as Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight. My character was recurring, but my storyline was intricate to the whole thing. With the character that I played, I got to go through all aspects of my instrument. I got to bring it to tears and to laughter.

Characters die all the time. At times, they die amongst a reader's tears, and at others, amongst the applause, and some, still, in quiet satisfaction.

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.

For me, some of the most intense creativity comes when something has to change for technical or design reasons, and you're trying to find a way to make it fit the fiction.

World-building numbs the reader's ability to fulfill their part of the bargain because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, world-building is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there.

Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.

One of the most interesting things about science fiction and fantasy is the way that the genres can offer different perspectives on matters to do with the body, the mind, medical technology, and the way we live our lives.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I'm a teen boy, so I like seeing blood and guts. I know it's fake, but I'm having fun.

I decided that, if I were to write a teen series, I'd want to set it in a place that was familiar to me - Manhattan, where I'd grown up - and I'd model the characters on myself and my friends.

'Looking For Alaska' by John Green is a very great book. I feel like every teenage girl says John Green's 'Fault In Our Stars,' but 'Looking For Alaska' is better.

I don't really see any barrier between teenage fiction and adult literature.

I've always been a big fan of Stephen King, especially in my teenage years.

I was a sci-fi addict when I was a kid and a teenager. Novels, graphic novels, movies, it was my way to deal with reality.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.

I read mostly science-fiction and fantasy when I was a teenager, and I was always drawn to stories where the characters had telepathic powers.

There is a saying: 'The child is parent to the adult', which means whatever happens to you as a child or teenager affects the adult you become. You are forged in your history. And fiction is an incredibly important force in shaping children, and that's why fiction needs to be diverse.

I'm a compulsive reader of fiction. I fell in love with novels when I was a teenager. My wife Marilyn and I... our initial friendship began because we are both readers. I've gone to sleep almost every night of my life after having read in a novel for 30 or 40 minutes. I'm a great reader of fiction and much less so of non-fiction.