Charles Bock Quotes

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.

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

Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

Sometimes I'll write something that's purely autobiographical, and sometimes pure fiction, and sometimes a mix.

Drawing on real life is what novelists do. It's not the same as reconstructing real life, which is what historians do.

There's a lot of material from my life in my books, but they're not really autobiographical, in the sense that they're not about my life. So, in 'A Feather on the Breath of God' I write about my parents, I write about this Russian immigrant, I write about the world of dance, but it isn't an autobiography; so much is left out.

I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

I hear people talk in my head, and I write it down. I choose where they live and how they dress to be real.

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.

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.