Justin Cartwright Quotes

As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.

One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms.

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

When you play a character, you get to see the world through their eyes. Whether it's a fictional world or a real world, you do get to see somebody else's point of view, whether he's a good guy or a bad guy.

Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

I love the idea of real-life experiences finding their way into fiction. I think that's really cool.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

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.

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

Whenever I write, I try and approach my stories from some kind of universal theme or idea or emotion.

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

But basically, I'm trying to write a fun story.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots... so I have to do something else.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.