Fiction Quotes - Page 33

• I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Writing, Mean, Details

  "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Continental Divides". Interview with Joseph Klarl, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 14, 2013.

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• I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Writing, Reality, Thinking

  "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Continental Divides". Interview with Joseph Klarl, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 14, 2013.

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• We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

  Agnes Varda

  Mean, Needs, Vagabonds

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. October 1, 2009.

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• I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.

  Vivian Gornick

  Writing, Stories, Agendas

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

  Vivian Gornick

  Produce, Human Condition, Feels

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.

  Vivian Gornick

  Desire, Ends, Modernism

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I sometimes joke that I am the first writer of historical fiction who can look out his window and point to the objects in his novels. I have a view of the entrance to the Bosporus, the old city, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Blue, Views, Cities

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• 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.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Art, Writing, Censorship

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• I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer.

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Book, Relate, International

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• No one ever got into science fiction for the sex or prestige. They got into it because they love it.

  China Mieville

  Sex, Prestige, Science Fiction

  Interview with Lou Anders, believermag.com. April 1, 2005.

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• One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

  China Mieville

  Fantasy, Weirdness, Ends

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Source: lbc.typepad.com

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• Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Writing, Talking, Body

  Source: lbc.typepad.com

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• I love the opportunity to just let my imagination run riot! Non-fiction can be very restrictive.

  Raymond Buckland

  Running, Opportunity, Imagination

  Source: paganpages.org

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• Aging has brought me greater liberty in fiction. When I was young I was harder on myself. I wrote with an idea of absolute seriousness.

  Dacia Maraini

  Ideas, Liberty, Aging

  Source: wordswithoutborders.org

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• I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Book, Thinking, Looks

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

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• Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Writing, Years, Two

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

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• I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Thinking, Narrators, Hey

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. March 17, 1999.

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• Probably the best way to describe my writing style is to refer you to "purple prose", which was a tag given to the early mass market magazine writers earning a half cent a word for their fiction. They had to use every adjective, verb and adverb in the English language to add word count to stories in order to feed and support families.

  Tom Johnson

  Writing, Order, Purple

  Source: ravenswoodpublishing.blogspot.com

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• Southern writing is regional: it includes dialect, settings, and cultural traditions from that region. However the themes and story conflicts are universal. My challenge is to write regional fiction without falling into the trap of nostalgia. There are important issues facing the south that I believe should be raised in the stories to make them contemporary, believable, and relevant to today's readers.

  Mary Alice Monroe

  Fall, Believe, Writing

  Source: www.maryannhenry.com

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• Maybe I have a one-track mind, but the best writers and thinkers are focusing on nonfiction these days; this is the genre where a writer can make a mark and change an aspect of the world - much more so than in fiction.

  Lee Gutkind

  Track, Mind, World

  Source: www.luxlotus.com

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• Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over.

  Will Hobbs

  Writing, Character, Magic

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• I've always found that when you're trying to create illusions with sound, especially in a science fiction or fantasy movie, that pulling sounds from the world around us is a great way to cement that illusion because you can go out and record an elevator in George Lucas's house or something, and it will have that motor sound.

  Ben Burtt

  Movie, Creating, House

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• The beauty of prose fiction that I see is simply that in order to create something you need only pay attention to personal exigency.

  James Kelman

  Order, Needs, Attention

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film.

  James Kelman

  Integrity, Drama, Mean

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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