Jim Rohn Quotes

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can't.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.

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 am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

I've always said fantasy is sort of 'stealth philosophy'.

The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

One of the first things that helped me to understand certain things about writing was seeing 'The Iceman Cometh' in the Village when I was a kid, before I ever became a newspaperman, and realizing that the world I knew could also be the subject of some amazing stuff.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

When we talk about novels, we don't often talk about imagination. Why not? Does it seem too first grade? In reviews, you read about limpid prose, about the faithful reproduction of consciousness, about moral heft, but rarely about the power of pure, unadulterated imagination.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.

Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.