Hilton Als Quotes

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

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Writers tell more truths, and more lies, than most.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

Like all writers, I draw from life as I know it; but it's a refracted kind of reality, and none of it is factually true.

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.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

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

I like to write about things that don't reflect exactly on my life.

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

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I make it all up, and all of it is true.

There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.

As a small child, I could watch anything happen and tell a story, and it was funny.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.