Quotes About Fiction

I've been into short stories ever since I read an Angela Carter collection when I was a teenager.

As a teenager, I read a lot of science-fiction, but then I read 'Catch-22' and 'The Catcher in the Rye' and started reading more literary fiction.

Issues to do with disability, mental health and not being neurotypical often affect many genuine teenagers but are rarely reflected in the fiction they read.

Of course Stephen King doesn't believe in teen novels. I've started to suspect he doesn't even believe in teenagers.

I've always found teenagers really interesting. I think they've got so much going on in their lives, so that lends itself really well to fiction because there's so much drama, so much activity, so much growth.

I think the reason teenage fiction is so popular with adults is that adults hunger for narrative just as badly as teenagers do.

As a psychologist, I'm painstakingly careful not to borrow my clients' stories for my fiction - but in a general sense, I'm very much inspired by all the teenagers I've been lucky enough to know and work with.

Comics have a problem, and that is continuity - the obsession with placing the characters in an existing world, where every event is marked in canon. You're supposed to believe that these weepy star boys of now are the same gung-ho super teens fighting space monsters in the '60s, and they've only aged perhaps five years.

I think teens are drawn to these speculative books that portray what might happen and what could happen.

Teens want to read something that isn't a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we're writing for our kids.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

When I wrote my novel, 'The Ministry of Special Cases,' I couldn't even brush my teeth. I had to write in isolation from everything else. I thought a play would take away from my fiction, but the more projects I work on, the more time I have.

I'm always reading. I've loved reading since I was young, and I've always loved sinking my teeth into a different world, especially one that you begin to create in your head.

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie - the key is in the incidental detail.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Every strong novel redefines our conception of fiction's dimensions and reorders our awareness of its possibilities.

When my fictional characters can't slash and slog and litter the pages with one another's carcasses, I'm an utter flop as a tale-spinner.

I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.