Koren Zailckas Quotes

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

But basically, I'm trying to write a fun story.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

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

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I like going back and writing fiction.

I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.

It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.