Alexander Chee Quotes

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

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

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

I read a lot of fiction.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

I just don't think I'm very good at fiction.