Ned Vizzini Quotes

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

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.

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

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

Literature invents its own rules.

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

I'm always trying to make something that is impossible to film. Why would somebody just read a novel when they can see it on TV or in the cinema? I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can't and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel, you can get right inside somebody's head.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

All nonmimetic fiction is a balancing act between 'reality' and the obviously unreal, with no attempt by the author to make the latter seem like the former. Sometimes it's not an easy tightrope to walk. But when it succeeds, such fiction can brilliantly illuminate the human condition.

I've spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that's only the starting point.

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'.

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I like going back and writing fiction.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.