Fiction Quotes - Page 38

• My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story.

  Philip Schultz

  Father, Struggle, Long

  Source: poems.com

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• The fiction writer has a lot of balls to juggle. Setting, pacing, dialogue, and so on. And let's not forget: plot. That was always a hard one for me. And I always had this spastic tendency to wrap up a story before I'd seen it the whole way through, a sort of writer's pre-ejaculatory tendency: "The End!"

  Cate Marvin

  Plot, Balls, Stories

  Source: www.redividerjournal.org

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• I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

  Nick Earls

  Real, People, Attention

  Source: www.stephbowe.com

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• 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.

  Gustavo Perez Firmat

  Fantasy, Realistic, Novel

  Source: www.gustavoperezfirmat.com

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• If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.

  Ethan Canin

  Insulting, Like You, Ifs

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• Many years ago I had two small children, and I wanted to be able to be home when they got home from school. And I didn't like the direction journalism was taking. I thought if I could write books, I could work at home and have the best of both worlds. I wrote my first mystery while still working full time, and it didn't sell, but the next one did sell, so I quit my job for the world of fiction. Scary, but I've never regretted it for a single day.

  Mary Kay Andrews

  Jobs, Children, Book

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• If you start looking at movies on a moral level - "I don't like that, that hurts, that's mean, that's bad" - then I don't even want to talk to you. Or like, someone that says "I don't like science-fiction movies," or "I don't want to sit through a Western," or "I don't like violence in movies," then I completely tune out.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Hurt, Mean, Tunes

  Interview with Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. April 22, 2009.

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• After having read a lot of fiction, literature, whatever you want to call it, from Wolfe to Houellebecq, I think you have to have an understanding and insight of the human condition that is informed and motivated by a desire to immerse yourself in the human world and bring these stories to bear.

  Henry Rollins

  Thinking, Understanding, Desire

  Source: paulsemel.com

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• I think to write fiction, this is just how I see it, you have to have a powerful need/desire to connect. I can't. Wanting to and not being able to has lead to a lot of misery in my life.

  Henry Rollins

  Powerful, Writing, Thinking

  Source: paulsemel.com

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• The solutions like freezing zygotes, fertilized eggs, of all kinds of animals and so on, or keeping them in zoos and having arboreta where we have trees, all these things have been promoted. Even getting the complete genetic code of various fishes so we can let them pass away and then we'll pull them back. That is science fiction run amok.

  E. O. Wilson

  Running, Zoos, Animal

  Source: blog.cleveland.com

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• I love science fiction but I don't like fantastic [cinema]. For example, if you have a magical ring and you can explode the world with it. What are we talking about? You know, it's not interesting. I don't like Lord of the Rings. Even Star Wars, for me, I don't understand this kind of story. But Alien, because the rules of the game are very precise, it could happen. I love science fiction. I have an idea about robots in the future.

  Jean-Pierre Jeunet

  Stars, War, Talking

  Source: collider.com

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• I am someone who values knowledge, actual knowledge. I also value stories and fiction a whole lot, and that's where the fake knowledge comes in.

  John Hodgman

  Fake, Stories, Whole

  Interview with Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. October 21, 2008.

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• I personally just want to do as many different things as I can do, whether it's comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, narrator... You've got a documentary, I've got a voice. Animated films. Big films, small films.

  Colin Farrell

  Drama, Voice, Narrators

  "Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, & Jessica Biel Discuss ‘Total Recall’". Interview with Tiffany Rose, screenrant.com. August 7, 2012.

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• Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.

  Paul Auster

  Book, Years, Giving

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

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• I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a tremendous compassion for him, which has grown over the years. A certain kind of pity for him also in that he was so unrealised as a human being, so dogged, and so shut-off from people in many ways. You know, I've been writing another book, and it's another non-fiction autobiographical work, kind of a compliment to "Winter Journal", and it's just finished.

  Paul Auster

  Dream, Father, Book

  Interview with Wayne Gooderham, www.timeout.com.

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• Fiction creating reality.

  Paul Auster

  Reality, Creating

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.194, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Trying, Kind

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. September 6, 2008.

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• I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

  John Hawkes

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  John Hawkes, Anthony C. Santore, Michael N. Pocalyko (1977). “A John Hawkes symposium: design and debris”, New Directions Publishing Corporation

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• In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.

  David Mitchell

  Numbers, People, Age

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• I like working closely with artists. I think that's very important in fantasy and science fiction - the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters.

  Margaret Weis

  Character, Science, Artist

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• Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.

  Jim Thompson

  Dad, Reading, Mind

  Jim Thompson (1997). “Crime novels: American noir of the 1950s”

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• I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can’t be like any other author’s really.

  Paul Kane

  Believe, Writing, Personality

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• I was writing fiction steadily, but I found that the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative.

  Vikram Chandra

  Writing, Relief, Narrative

  Vikram Chandra (2013). “Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software”, p.22, Faber & Faber

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• Science Fiction: Any scientific acclaim that omits God

  Johnny Hart

  Science Fiction, Acclaim

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• The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

  Graham Greene

  Plot, Remember, Ends

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