Deborah Moggach Quotes

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

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

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

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

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

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

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

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

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.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

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

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.

I don't look at stories in genres. A good story is a good story, no matter what planet it happens on, whether the characters are mice or human or whatever. That's how I look at it.

I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.

A well-written novel, the most immersive of all forms of storytelling, should command your full attention and belief.

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.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

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

You live vicariously through your characters.

My stories include realistic fiction and fantasy.