Dustin Lance Black Quotes

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

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

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.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

I should say, I don't write about myself or my life. So for me, in fiction, it's always been about what I can dream up, that feels far away from me.

As a writer of fiction, you don't ever want to limit the characters you create to the life you've lived. That's insanity to me.

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

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

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

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

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.

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

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.

The opportunity to create a small world between two pieces of cardboard, where time exists yet stands still, where people talk and I tell them what to say, is exciting and rewarding.

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

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

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