Alan Cheuse Quotes

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

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.

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

Sometimes a novelist can get closer to the truth than the historian can.

There are autobiographical elements to the albums, and when I write, I always reference my own life as well as other things, so I'm just like any novelist or any fiction writer who tells stories.

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

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

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

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

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.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.