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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There’s is no fiction surreal enough to capture our current reality.
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I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!
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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 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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That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.
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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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About a year after (my stories began being published), magazine editor George Scithers, suggested to me that since I was so new at being published, I must be very close to what I had to learn to move from fooling around with writing to actually producing professional stories. There are a lot of aspiring writers out there who would like to know just that. Write that book.SFWW-I is that book. It's the book I was looking for when I first started writing fiction.
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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 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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I started writing nonfiction because nonfiction is well-suited to subjects that, if you wrote them as fiction, people would say, "I don't believe this. This is a little outlandish".
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There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.
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People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books.
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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'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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I love science fiction stuff - I'm a bit of a dweeb like that.
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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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I'm a daydreamer - a purposeful one when I'm writing 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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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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A poet's fiction should at least be plausible.
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Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.
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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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I'm not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can't do that when I'm on a TV show - our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I'll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons - unless I'm actively writing a script for the show I'm working on, in which case there's no time to write fiction at all.
