Neil Cross Quotes

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

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.

I didn't consciously make the decision to write an adult novel. I didn't think of it as my riposte to the YA genre.

It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.

In general, fiction is divided into 'literary fiction' and 'commercial fiction.' Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn't stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed.

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

I had been very dismissive of popular fiction - in fact, I'd refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren't the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way.

I never actually wanted to write horror, oddly enough. It was a kind of misnomer, because I didn't ever actually write horror in the sense of the genre known for it. It was more a type of pigeon-holing in bookshops.

The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.

God isn't afraid of our doubts; He's way more concerned when we fake it.

I'm sold as a literary writer in Holland; I'm sold as crime fiction in England. I think of it as just literature.

I mean, it's impossible to fake anything if you've already seen the other person in a way they'd never choose for you to. You can't go back from that.

You can fake your way to the table, but ultimately you have to learn how to eat.

Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake.

One of the hardest things in the world is to perform on record and get someone to enjoy and feel what you're doing. It's unlike, like TV you can, you can fake it with the face and the crying and the bits. Recording is completely different.

If I like it, I say it's mine. If I don't I say it's a fake.

Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense.

Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)

You can't fake some of this chemistry, even when you get a guy and a girl and they've got to be together.

Fake is not a word I like to use because there's nothing fake about what I do. It's a show, it's a predetermined outcome; we're putting on a television drama, action, comedy, whatever you want to call it - but it's not fake. Fake would be if I was just about to take a body slam, and my stuntman did it. Fake would be if I was going to take a chair shot to the head, and the chair was made of rubber. I'll tell the world that it's a show, but I hate the word fake. It's such an unfair term to us.

"True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

Be real about what you do. Stay true to the voice inside you. Don't let the 'business' change what it is you love because the people, the fans, respond to what is heartfelt. They can always tell when a singer is faking it.

Everything that looks too perfect is too perfect to be perfect.