John Fowles Quotes

I like going back and writing fiction.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

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

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

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

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.

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.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

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

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

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

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

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

I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind - mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

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.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

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.