Diane Ackerman Quotes

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability to lie with a straight face as a child.

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use.

I was never a good journalist, because I would make things up. A lot of people frowned on that, which is why I ended up in fiction.

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

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

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.

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.

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

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

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

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

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

I always say show me a storyteller who doesn't embellish, and I'll show you a bad one.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

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

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

I never thought I could write fiction.

Ultimately, in my mind, that's what I'm trying to do with my fiction; I'm trying to transport my reader into a different world.

If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all.