The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.
Every vampire fiction reinvents vampires to its own needs. You take what you want.
The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality.
One of the things that all authors of fiction must learn to judge is whether - and in what detail - to describe the face of a character.
Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.
I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.
Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.
Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.
I can remember when 'Pulp Fiction' came out. I was, like, 10 years old. But I remember the impact that it had.
The fictional character with whom I most profoundly identified was Yossarian in Catch-22. Always did, still do.
I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.
Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.
I was 9 when I wrote 'Fate Stay with Me.' It was this fictional song about romance gone wrong.
The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.
It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.
I have been tossing around the idea of writing some non-fiction. Maybe a collection of short stories about my experience being a mom and how not to be perfect.
Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.
Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.
Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.
