Quotes About Fiction

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

How do you document real life, when real life's getting more like fiction each day.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

I've never turned into a bee - I've never been chased by a mummy or met a ghost. But many of the ideas in my books are suggested by real life.

Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters.

Growing up I always loved films that transport you to another world and has things you never see in every day life.

Life's tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars' worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can't do that. So fiction does.

Fantasy allows you bend the world and the situation to more clearly focus on the moral aspects of what's happening. In fantasy you can distill life down to the essence of your story.

A lie to get out of something, or take an advantage for oneself, that's one thing; but a lie to make life more interesting—well, that's entirely different.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

Some characters become your friends for life. That's how it was for me with Betsy-Tacy.

Fiction is the history of the obscure.

Okay, let's say that a metamove or metagesture is when the author intentionally draws attention to a work's genre, its very existence as fiction or nonfiction.

WHEN IT WAS DECIDED (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction, what was not taken into account was that for some of us truth can never be an absolute, that there can (at best) be only less true and more true and sometimes those two collapse inside each other like aTurducken.

Of course, once you had yanked Conan the Barbarian's sword out of a book to fight off a rabid weresquirrel, "impossible" lost a lot of its punch.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.