Sarah Weinman Quotes

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.

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.

Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

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

I like to reserve the right to write about whatever I like.

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

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

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

I don't like getting stuck into someone's definition of what you can or can't do with a story.

My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.

I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world.

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

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?

In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story.

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

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.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.