Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
I do a great deal of research. I don’t want anyone to say, ‘That could not have happened. ’ It may be fiction, but it has to be true.
You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary.
Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience. . . Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.
I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
Some people just don't seem to understand the concept of fiction. It is fiction; it ain't true, folks
Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.
Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.
When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.
To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.
I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.
It's always great when you want scientific fact to get a really good science fiction writer to talk to you about it.
Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.
I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.
Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.