Fiction Quotes
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For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
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I love science fiction stuff - I'm a bit of a dweeb like that.
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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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That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.
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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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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 think if you looked at the kind of ebb and flow of supernatural fiction and horror fiction, it does seem to be more popular in times when were hammered over the head daily with threats from all angles, very real threats.
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Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.
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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 lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.
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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'm a daydreamer - a purposeful one when I'm writing fiction.
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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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You can't write any form of fiction unless you enjoy reading it. You must be sincere in your approach. It's no good despising the form. So many people think they could earn some money from writing something for which they have no affection. It won't work. The first thing you have to have is belief.
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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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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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Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
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I've written some short stories about my personal experience, but it's not something you can use everywhere. Every novel, every work of fiction, needs its own food.
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I believe the word "perfection" should be changed to "pure fiction" - it's just not possible!
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Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.
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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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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'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.
