Joyce Cary Quotes

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

Well, I'm always drawn to the drama first. A story is really only interesting to me, if you can remove all of the genre moments and remove the supernatural element, and it still works. Then, I'm interested.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

I write books that will make 10 or 12 hours disappear, and hopefully they'll resonate with you for a few days, where you'll remember the characters and the story. That suits me fine; I am happy with that.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.