I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.
Whether you've done anything wrong or not people will write whatever they want, so it's just a matter of not reading it, not buying into it, and hopefully the people that do read it realise that it's just fictional stories for entertainment.
It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.
If we truly seek diversity in fiction, we have to let the needs of others come before our need to define ourselves as social justice allies.
Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.
I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.
I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.
I come out of an academic background, and I'm aware that what I'm doing is simultaneously research and fiction. I want to meet both those obligations.
I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
The biggest fatal flaw in most fictional portrayals of nanotech - what sends those books arcing across the room - is ignoring that the nanobots need energy to do... anything.
Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon
There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon dates and it's never enough.
That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.
The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction - that 'Europe' has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.
Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.
The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.
