Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human i
Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be...
If something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real...
I love fictional characters...they can't break your heart.
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that wind...
Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.
Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.
A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.
There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't refl...
The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works...
General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
...required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.
Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my n...