Rex Stout Quotes

My action follows my characters. If a character is a cop, you cannot be posing all the time, you cannot fly off the roof because it doesn't make any sense - it's not practical.

If it's fiction, then it better be true.

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

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

I want my fiction to seem real.

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

When I write for kids, I have to make sure they know what can't happen. They have to know it's a fantasy. But when I write for adults, they have to think it's real. Every detail has to be real or they won't buy it.

If the audience sees and feels things are real, then they buy it.

Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.

We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'

Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can't believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I'm interested in.

The story she had told me was possible, but it was not believable.

Fiction intended to please, should resemble truth as much as possible.

I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty - but life, for me, is a violent thing.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.