James Payn Quotes

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people's true stories. And to be fair, I let other people's stories trespass the truth of mine.

When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you're not working in that format, it's fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

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

I'm not a writer, and I don't want there to be any mistake about that.

I think teaching keeps me honest because if I'm up in front of a class talking about what I think is important about fiction while knowing I myself have just failed to do that hours earlier at my computer - it's a good and humbling reminder.

I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.

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.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Oh, in France you can't defame an idea, only a person.

A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

The basic idea of defamation law is simple. It is an attempt to balance the private right to protect one's reputation with the public right to freedom of speech …. defamation law is often used by the rich and powerful to deter criticisms. It is seldom helpful to ordinary people whose reputations are attacked unfairly.

The greater the truth the greater the libel.

The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject however pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason, nor any masterly compositions on the general nature of governmetn ...

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

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

Having to censor yourself - whether it's lying at the water cooler about how you spent your weekend, scrubbing your Facebook page of any revealing facts, or pretending to be with someone you aren't - is the antithesis of our foundation as a nation based on freedom of expression and association.

I don't write autobiographically.

People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens.

When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

My books aren't autobiographical.

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

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