Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.
Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.
If literary fiction is reduced to only middle-class families dealing only with middle-class angst, then it’s really finished as a force for grappling with the world.
The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.
Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.
I think the thing that I lost in myself when I stopped writing fiction and the thing that I rediscovered and started mining again is, for lack of a better word, magic. It's the way you can brush up against the inexplicable and the mystical.
It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
I love thrillers. I would even read certain science fiction, although I haven't been a devotee for many years.
I'm much more drawn to fiction, to short stories, and to plays, than I am to diarists.
It's horrid to be called a Shakespearean actor because that's incredibly limiting, and we love acting. We like telling stories, anything that excites us we want to be a part of. Science fiction is fun too!
Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million,. . . but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.
I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.
I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.
The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story.
One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.
If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.
Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage.
I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.