Fiction Quotes
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As for whether genre considerations influence what I write, they don't at all, but I might sell more books if they did. The Night Journal is a hodge-podge of historical fiction, western, mystery, and contemporary domestic drama. It doesn't settle into a specific market, reviewers have a hard time describing it, and sometimes it gets classified weirdly in bookstores. But from a writer's standpoint, I like that it's hard to categorize.
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I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
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That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.
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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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The power of story is potent and that's why historical fiction can be an extraordinarily significant way of teaching people logical truth propositions, moves you along, moves your emotions as well as informs your intellect.
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The goal in blogging/ business/ inspiring non-fiction is to share a truth, or at least a truth as the writer sees it. To not just share it, but to spread it and to cause change to happen. You can do that in at least three ways: with research (your own or reporting on others), by building and describing conceptual structures, or with stories that resonate.
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For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
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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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I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.
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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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Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.
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I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.
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I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.
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As a kid I was enamored with fiction, most of it utterly forgettable and long forgotten.
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It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.
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Reality is in the business of killing off fiction.
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Being able to write creatively or read creative fiction is the best way to exercise your imagination.
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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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Truth is stranger than fiction, which is why reality TV is so popular.
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I was always fascinated by science-fiction shows, shows like 'Star Trek' and 'Lost in Space.'
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Unbreakable is a little bit Starship Troopers and a little bit Esmay Suiza, with a dash of Firefly for flavor. W. C. Bauers gives us everything we want in our military science fiction, but never allows the hardware and action to overshadow Paen and everyone else caught in the crossfire.
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I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.
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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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As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.
