Neel Mukherjee Quotes

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.

Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.

I'm really into the idea of telling stories. Everyone needs stories. Everyone needs to escape every once in a while.

I love fiction, you know? I find it fascinating. So when film really does go into fictional places, that's the most exciting for me. And when the fiction is about the person rather than about the place, that's even more exciting.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.

I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'

Novels are longer than life.

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

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself.

You live vicariously through your characters.

I should say, I don't write about myself or my life. So for me, in fiction, it's always been about what I can dream up, that feels far away from me.

A lot of fiction doesn't answer a question that any reasonable person would ever ask.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

I'm a storyteller, not a prophet. I'm just interested in a good story.

Those of us with this ancient compulsion to tell stories sometimes start with a single kernel of something.

Everyone seems quite good at stories and making them up.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.