Every fiction since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, utility.
Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.
I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself.
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.
Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character.
How easy it is to tell tales!
I am not dangerous. Only the stories are dangerous. Only the fictions we create, especially when they become expectations.
There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.
Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
I'm a huge historical fiction and non-fiction fan.
We need more science, but what we especially need is science fiction.
People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.
in the press, my sex life was something else again. I was Lady Bountiful of the Sheets. Some of the best fiction of the Sixties was written about my amorous adventures with an assortment of lovers who could have only been chosen by a berserk random sampler.
My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.
Corporations are not legal "persons" with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.
I'm not well-versed in the science fiction world. I'm hoping that I'll get more opportunities in it because you get to create a new world.
There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.
In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.
However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.
I'm the only member of SFWA in Nebraska, but I don't pine away for the companionship of other science fiction writers. I [go] to very few conventions. I'm quite willing to be that eccentric who has a very odd job, quite happy to be the only science fiction writer in town.
