Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

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.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

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

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.

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

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

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

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.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

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

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

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.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.