Fiction Quotes
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I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.
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I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
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I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!
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Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
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I'm a daydreamer - a purposeful one when I'm writing fiction.
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I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
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Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.
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I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.
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I love science fiction stuff - I'm a bit of a dweeb like that.
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The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.
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I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction. In conversations with him I realized that translations have been my MFA program. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English. That's how I've figured it out.
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Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.
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It remains a mystery to me why some of that pulp fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social literary fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.
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I believe the word "perfection" should be changed to "pure fiction" - it's just not possible!
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As a kid I was enamored with fiction, most of it utterly forgettable and long forgotten.
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People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.
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Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
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I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.
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When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction."
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I haven't written adult fiction, but I do not sugarcoat grief - or what I expect grief to be.
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Reality is in the business of killing off fiction.
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Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
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Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.
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When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.
