Vincent: Thank you. Mind if I shoot it up here? Lance: Hey, mi casa su casa.
Esmeralda: So what does it feel like to kill a man with your bare hands? It's a topic I'm very interested in.
[after Mia has her overdose] Vincent: Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, fuck me! Fuck me!
Vincent: If you'll excuse me, I gotta go home and have a heart attack.
The Bartender: The one thing that this job has taught me is that truth is stranger than fiction.
Harold Crick: [to Ana] This may sound like gibberish to you, but I think I'm in a tradgedy.
Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.
The aliens coming and wiping our electricity and having technical power over us... we don't know what's out there. It something that seems so fictional, but it's something that's possible.
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.
I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.
It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.
A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonist's taste in music, or we're told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.
I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.
I'm a big 'Star Wars' fan and grew up watching the movies. I read all the books and have read 'Star Wars' fiction that went between the newest trilogy and the original trilogy and it was part of my childhood.
