One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.
In times of trial, for inspiration, people want to look to real people rather than to fiction.
My taste in watching things runs from dramas and low-budget films to high-end fantasy/science fiction.
Fiction has to be well researched, properly conceived and logically presented. Reality needs none of the above.
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.
Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.
I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
Because at bottom, I'm interested in fear, and in courage and cowardice and these are easier to get at through fiction, where you can enter people's heads.
It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
A lot of the futuristic space stuff seemed to me to be a very cool form of science-fiction, so that was my first real baptism in the genre.
If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.
I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.
I've been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history.
I think any period in history can be adapted into interesting fiction, as long as you approach the actual history with respect.
Words have great cumulative power, but in the 21st century, a single image is much stronger. An image suggests the unvarnished truth. That is its power and its fiction.
I'm such a huge fan of fan fiction, to me it's a great way for readers to become writers. It's like putting the training wheels on for writing.
I would rather portray the hero if it's a really great film. All my favorite fictional film characters are heroes, such as in 'The Last of the Mohicans' and 'Robin Hood.'
As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
I think that fiction is an excellent place for us to struggle with questions of good and evil, and humanity and inhumanity.
