I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.
Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. . . Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.
Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.
God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.
Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.
This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.
In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, 'Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?' I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
Science fiction has always had a dark side. There has been a touch of the irrational and absurd in the genre from the very beginning.
The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction - that 'Europe' has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.
You read a script and its based on 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Pulp Fiction', and it goes right in the bin.
I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
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. "
The shape I'm in, I could donate my body to science fiction.
The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.
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.
Comics also led a lot of young people to science fiction.
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.
It often happens that people come to believe in their own fictions.