I like New York. There are similarities with London that make it feel rather like home, but at the same time it's slightly fictional.
Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.
I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism.
When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.
I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
People realize that Salieri is not the man we saw in the Amadeus movie. That man had no talent. It was a great movie, but the Salieri character was a big fiction.
I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.
I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
Life is not a piece of tragic fiction in which, at the end of the reading, we all get up and go out for drinks.
There's more fiction in my life than in books, so I don't bother with them.
Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.
I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.
I like fiction. I love all sorts of love stories, I think. I even watched '17 Again.'
It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.
There is a very conservative element of crime writers that don't recognise what I do is crime fiction.
Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment.
