Susan Minot Quotes

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

I never thought I could write fiction.

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

I don't write a lot of fiction.

I will never write fiction.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

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.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

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.

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.

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

Sometimes my lyrics may describe a situation that happened to a friend. Other times, I create a story from the ground up.

My novels are all ideas.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

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

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.