fiction quotes

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.