Horace Mann Quotes

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

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.

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.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

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

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

I've tried to tell a story. For me, it is the best one.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

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

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

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

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

I think of my novels as entertainments.