Fiction Quotes - Page 40

• You can start a documentary with just a camera, as opposed to a fiction film where you need actors, a crew, a script, a lot more start-up resources. It may be self-perpetuating.

  Thom Powers

  Self, Cameras, Needs

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• I never wanted to be an editor. I never wanted to be a boss. I just wanted to write, and it didn't make any difference whether it was fiction or nonfiction or short stories or whatever. I just - that's what I was destined to do.

  Frank Deford

  Writing, Editors, Differences

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• What I'm doing is exploring things. This is why I'm a fiction writer rather than an essayist or a politician or whatever. I just gather material and find a scenario, and see where it takes me. I don't have a plan.

  T.C. Boyle

  Politician, Take Me, Plans

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.

  Jacqueline Winspear

  Believe, Thinking, Anchors

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• As a kid I was enamored with fiction, most of it utterly forgettable and long forgotten.

  Andrew Bacevich

  Kids, Long, Forgotten

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Real, Lying, Reading

  "A Voice in Haiti’s Chorus". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. 2010.

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• After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Writing, Discovery, Long

  "A Voice in Haiti’s Chorus". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. 2010.

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• We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Thinking, Drawing, Caves

  "A Voice in Haiti’s Chorus". Interview with Elizabeth Gettelman, www.motherjones.com. 2010.

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• I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.

  William T. Vollmann

  Writing, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.

  William T. Vollmann

  Successful, Flaws, Written

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• I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.

  Kate Zambreno

  Teaching, Writing, Practice

  "The naming is a political act, the writing is a political act, a revolt against disappearance". Interview with Noah Charney, logger.believermag.com. November 3, 2014.

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• I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.

  Kate Zambreno

  Philosophy, Writing, Thinking

  "The naming is a political act, the writing is a political act, a revolt against disappearance". Interview With Noah Charney, logger.believermag.com. November 3, 2014.

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• Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

  Ben Marcus

  Complicated, Breaking Down, Tricks

  "'A reading list is not my trophy case.' An Interview with Ben Marcus About His Syllabus". Interview with Stephanie Palumbo, logger.believermag.com. June 24, 2014.

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• My fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that's different but it's familiar enough that it freaks people out a little.

  Daniel Suarez

  People, Different, Horizon

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.

  Ben Lerner

  Writing, Thinking, Self

  Interview with Tao Lin, www.believermag.com. 2014.

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• I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Book, Writing, Wanted

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 1, 2011.

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• My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

  Ben Lerner

  Real, World, Narrative

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, Knowing, World

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

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• I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, Contemporary Fiction, Literature

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

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• Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

  Ben Lerner

  Past, Contemporary Fiction, Historical

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

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• I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

  Ben Lerner

  Past, Building, Residency

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

  Ben Lerner

  Writing, Stories, Construction

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, Mind, Stories

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor

  Ben Lerner

  Art, Book, Track

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

  Ben Lerner

  Literary Genre, Dying, Capacity

  Source: www.believermag.com

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