Fiction Quotes
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The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.
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Science to me is sufficiently weird and interesting, and stranger than fiction.
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Spreadsheets are fiction. Believing in what you're doing and what you're building is what's important.
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I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.
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In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill.
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Being is a fiction invented by those who suffer from becoming.
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I read a bit of Ray Bradbury when I was a younger man. I don't read a lot of fiction anymore... like, none.
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At one time in my career, Barnes and Noble bookstores categorized my books as religious fiction.
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I'm most interested in people who've lived life in the extreme, which is what draws me to crime fiction.
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The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.
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The purpose of fiction is to combat loneliness.
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You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.
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With writing fiction, I'm either not courageous enough or just not suited for telling truths in a more conventional way. As an actor, I inhabit those characters as I'm writing them.
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For a genre that's about looking to the future, science fiction has sure been looking backwards lately. Nostalgia is what sells best, with readers spending their money on movie tie-in novels and sequels to long-running series.
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The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.
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Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.
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In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don't talk about in reality.
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We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination.
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By all the rules of modern fiction there should have been gunsmoke mingling its acrid blue with the brown haze of corral dust. Dead men should have fallen and been trampled... Nothing of this sort happened.
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Most apocalyptic fiction makes it very clear that it's the end of the world. But 'Bird Box' hasn't convinced me of that. Is 'Bird Box' instead a suburban neurotic nightmare? I don't think so. But it's fun to consider.
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I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself.
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Science fiction is a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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I feel engaged with young people in Pakistan. But that said, it's still a small minority that reads novels, literary fiction. But it isn't necessarily a small minority of the wealthy elite in the city of Lahore. It can often be and I often do meet at literary festivals students who've ridden a bus 12 hours from a very small town just to hear some of their favorite writers come and speak.
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Fiction has always evoked pictures and provoked ideas and sounds in my mind.
