Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.
People in Michigan are good at separating fact from fiction. They know, better than most of the country, what happens to the economy and jobs when the scales are tipped too far in favor of one group over another.
Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.
I might not write fiction in the literary sense. But I write very well. My characters are good. My dialogue is good. And my stories are really involving.
I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.
Forget romantic fiction, a survey has found that most women would rather read a good book than go shopping, have sex, or sleep.
I do really enjoy Jay McInerney's wine writing. He's a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He's not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it.
On 'Stranger Than Fiction,' the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page.
There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.
Today's youth cannot miss something they have never known, but I fear that there are no current fictional characters whose impact and influence will last with such abiding affection into their 'sore and yellow' as this splendid man's creations have i...
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
Within the realm of fiction, it is always tempting to set one's stories in a dystopian future, where all our misgivings about state power can be shown in full force.
It's still funny for me to think of myself as someone who writes historical fiction because it seems like a really fusty, musty term, and yet it clearly applies.
One thing I think is least realistic is that there were five people that made decisions in the fictional 'West Wing.' In real life, there are about five million people that weigh in.
As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.
