I think, for sure, 'Saturday Night Fever' and 'Pulp Fiction' were kind of bookends for - or the pillars of - my career.
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.
I go to readings by fiction writers like Alice Walker, and I'm envious of the level of attention they generate.
Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.
Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.
Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.
For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.
I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.
As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.
As a reader, I notice political views regardless of whether or not the book is fiction. What annoys me is when said views do nothing to advance the narrative.
In 'Out of the Dark,' I'm talking about my own life. I'm not talking as a character or speaking as a character. I was not as free as when I write fiction.
A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.
I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't.
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.
Esmeralda: What is your name? Butch: Butch. Esmeralda: What does it mean? Butch: I'm American, honey. Our names don't mean shit.
Butch: I think I cracked a rib. Fabienne: Giving me oral pleasure? Butch: No, retard, from the fight.
