Helen Dunmore Quotes

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

I love writing shorter fiction.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

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

I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

I never thought I could write fiction.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

I like small stories.

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

I will never write fiction.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.