Fiction Quotes
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The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850.
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I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
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The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed ? the deed is everything.
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I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
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Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
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It is more important to detect corruption than fiction.
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After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
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When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.
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If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
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Happily, fantastic fiction is slowly gaining in status.
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Don't take our word for it. Read the Bible itself. Read the statements of preachers. And you will understand that God is the most desperate character, the worst villain in all fiction.
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Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.
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In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
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I don't believe in inspiration at all. We live in a world that demands explanation. And fiction has the capability to offer explanations for things.
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I am always interested in characters who are in these kinds of transitional moments in their lives, when it's not clear where they're going to end up. It's interesting territory for fiction.
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I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.
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The biggest problem in the fictional treatment of sex is that it's not treated as part of the story but as a pause from the story. The best sex scenes in fiction are the ones that advance the story.
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Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
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Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?
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Human life is fiction's only theme.
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A book is a story, even if it's non-fiction, and once I've read it, I have the story with me inside my head always.
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I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
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I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.
