Craig Mazin Quotes

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.

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

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

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

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.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

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.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

I read a lot of fiction.