Fiction Quotes - Page 65

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

I read fiction all the time. It's true that I don't like fantasy or science fiction. I like "realistic" novels, particularly those in which nothing much ever happens.

Science fiction works best when it stimulates debate.

It's kind of a misnomer about science fiction that science fiction is about anything other than people. It's about people doing stuff, sometimes doing extraordinary stuff.

I've actually usually been wary of taking on science fiction as an actor because it's really tough to do. It's really difficult to execute. There's often lots of prosthetics, green screen and special effects, and it can get very technical.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene.

If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

What's needed today, now, more than ever, is 'Star Peace' for there is an ominous, mutual threat to all science fiction. It's called 'Twilight'. And it is really, really bad.

With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are.

I think if someone could demonstrate to me that fiction did no good, I would still do it, because I think it does good for me.

As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.

In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

With fiction, and also with nonfiction that you can take your time doing, you have a much better chance of reaching across the divide and connecting with somebody who is opposed to you on some things. They're opposed to you on one axis, which is politics, but if you go over the axis called puppies, you might find some common ground.

That's one of the reasons I take a lot of consolation in fiction. You have years to work on it. I think that allows you to reach for the best part of your reader instead of a lot of the internet stuff, in which you're kind of reaching for the worst or the most shallow part of your reader.

When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.

I have a lot of theories about the beneficial effects of fiction, but I'm always trying to get away from them a little bit.

Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically.

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.