Emily Giffin Quotes

I like going back and writing fiction.

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 would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

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

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

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.

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.

Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination.

Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

I suppose I'm pulled towards fiction because I really like the freedom it gives me.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.