Fiction Quotes - Page 58

I grew up reading crime fiction and, especially in the '80s, women were just there to be saved or screwed.

A lot of men just don't read. They don't read fiction at all.

I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the President, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that's not the kind of fiction that I like to read.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

I really believe that fiction functions best when stories are allowed to develop in an organic way, so I didn't set out to deliver a specific message.

I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

Corporations are not legal "persons" with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.

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.

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.

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.

Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they're asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.

In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

[The Women's Room] is very much a white woman's piece of fiction, for sure. But for me, as a white woman, I related to a lot of it and continue to as I've gotten older, and especially at this moment in time, I want to read it again.

[The Women's Room] is one of those pieces of fiction that reveals itself in a different way every time. It's incredible.

But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

Most fiction series are written so that the reader can come in at any point and not feel lost, but if you can start at the beginning, why not?

History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.

These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not.

I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.