Anthony Burgess Quotes

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

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 started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

Sometimes, like in 'Invisible Monsters,' I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

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

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

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

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.