Fiction Quotes - Page 70

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

If anyone ever said biopic I would say, "It's not a biopic." We're fighting uphill against the weight of history. I was like, why don't we just call it historical fiction?

Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States.

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

History is an agreed-upon fiction.

Emotional truths can sometimes be conveyed more effectively, more compellingly, through fiction.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

Modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988 (.....) Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times.

For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg.

Science fiction was never my thing. I have no interest in it.

Science fiction was never my thing. I have no interest in it. So I don't think I could successfully pull off being on a project like that without really losing my mind.

How easy it is to tell tales!

With the historical fictions, I was already doing so much research, and so much of the stories was anchored by historical truth that the move to nonfiction didn't feel all that dramatic - just another half-step to the right.

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

The world is a very complex and interesting place and that is what I really want my fiction to say: wake up to how amazing the world is.

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

There are trappings of science fiction which I kind of embrace, but there are also cliches which I run from.

In all my science fiction movies, I try to blend the familiar with the futuristic so as not to be too off putting to the audience. There is always something familiar they can grab onto.

More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.