Nick Harkaway Quotes

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.

It never ceases to amaze me that readers who are willing to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the motivation of a vicious serial killer get high and mighty because I have put a coffee shop where there isn't one. Er... it's a novel. I made one up. I'm allowed to make stuff up. I'd go as far as to suggest that I make stuff up for a living.

I think, when you are writing non-fiction, you feel there's an obligation to get it absolutely right, so all your factual details have to be, have, you know, to go through a long list of them and tick them. I'm not saying that's not important in fiction, but I think you have a bit more leeway; you can suit yourself.

The great liberation of imaginative writing is that you're not held back by the facts.

The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

In a book, you can describe a scene and have any song you want playing on the radio and have any painting you want hanging on the wall. That was really freeing to me when I was writing 'Ready Player One.' I could throw in everything that I love.

I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.

Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.

In a novel, the only budgetary limitations are that of your imagination.

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

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that no one is stopping you. There's no one saying, 'You can't do that.'

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

When you give an artist a canvas, you shouldn't tell him exactly how much paint to put on it, or exactly how sharp the images should be. You should let the artist get going.

The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life... I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can't be forced. I see no need to write about anything else or any other type of world.

The things that I'm interested in directing are fiction, because then you're not married to a particular reality.