Quotes About Fiction

When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.

To me, fiction is the single best way there is - to me, it's the most profound way - of dealing with questions that have no answers.

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

For millennia, human beings have been finding new ways to look at the world through each others' eyes: from projecting ourselves onto the characters in novels or movies to dressing up in costume to devouring the details of some celebrity's life in 'Hello' or 'OK.'

Sometimes, a writer 'character' is just a projection of a person who is writing the story, but not necessarily 'me.'

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.

The '70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.

Of course all novelists are egomaniacs and want to draw everyone to their fold just like any other preacher. The snake-oil peddler, the false prophet, all of this is fascinating to me. But I certainly hope that I'm more humane than that.

Picking apart a story for its scientific underpinnings doesn't diminish it, it enhances it, makes us dream of the possibilities it proposes. I think appreciating the magic of reality, going from 'can't happen' to 'could happen,' is the fundamental appeal of science fiction.

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

My focus will always be crime, but it might not always be fiction, nor always for adults, nor books entirely in prose. That's a lot of ground to cover, so I might as well begin.

What I see as the particularly exciting prospect for writing horror fiction as we go forward is setting stories in more internal landscapes than external ones, mapping out the mind as the home for scary things instead of the house at the end of the lane or lakeside campground or abandoned amusement park.

I like to write stories that read like historical fiction about great, world-changing events through the lens of a flawed protagonist.

It would have been easier to have a male protagonist, but I didn't want people to assume that Nikki Hill was me in her entirety because a lot of people just don't like me and I don't think they would be interested in reading about me, even in the fictional context.

I like animal sidekicks. They seem to be a pretty cool trope of post-apocalyptic fiction - just because if you're going to have this lone protagonist, they're going to need someone to talk to. Dogs are overused, and cats are dumb. So that leaves monkeys.

As far as characters in fiction that I really admire - it's pretty strong to say you would wish that you had created another character - but I'll throw out Will Graham, the protagonist in 'Red Dragon,' a book I've read several times.

Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

In 'Nier Automata', the protagonists are androids, not humans, and that's very common in a Science Fiction story.

Getting out to protest, this is something real and, I would say, something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action.