Fictional Settings Quotes

I loved movies. In particular, I loved movies depicting places and events that obviously you couldn't have gone out and shot. It was obvious you were looking at something that had been manufactured in some way. I was fascinated by that.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

I really feel that's part of why audiences go to movies now is to take you to a world you have no access to, whether it's the world of Avengers or Middle-earth or bars in Boston you would be afraid to go into. You see characters there - they aren't hobbits but they're close.

We know that the elements in play in a show like 'Confederate' are much more raw, much more real, and people come into them much more sensitive and more invested, than they do with a story about a place called 'Westeros,' which none of them had ever heard of before they read the books or watched the show.

I don't think of 'Monsters, Inc.' as existing in the same space as Carl Frederickson from 'Up,' or whatever, you know? They seem like completely different universes to me.

There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

I write about times and places I would visit in a time machine, like ancient Rome or the Wild West.

I think most writers' houses are disappointing. What's much more atmospheric and interesting are the places they wrote about.

I can relate to historical characters or imaginary ones. It doesn't matter if a story takes place in the future or in the present, as long as the story is compelling.

Narnia, Middle-earth and New York were my three fantasy universes when I was a kid.

I feel as though I've gotten to a point where I don't really want to set a book in any real place ever again.

As soon as I started reading, I found myself drawn to fictional character's homes as much as I was to the characters themselves.

I love worldbuilding. It's as much fun for me as writing itself. It's like a hobby of mine.

When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the reader longs to be somewhere, not just anywhere, and certainly not nowhere.

Stories about sensitive issues like sex, drugs or sexual assault, suicide and teen drinking, are often censored because people just don't want to talk about those things. It's not that these things don't happen, but when they're shared in a fictional setting, for some reason they make some people uncomfortable.