Fictionalization Quotes

It's very difficult to judge yourself. Extreme self-doubt is only attractive when it's fictionalized. Which is why people love the movies. They are so reassuring.

I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.

It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

I like when they say a movie is inspired by a true story. That's kind of silly. "Hey, Mitch, did you hear that story about that lady who drove her car into the lake with her kids and they all drowned?" "Yeah, I did, and you know what - that inspires me to write a movie about a gorilla!"

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

'Cry Baby' is like this fairytale version of me. A lot of it is based on real events, and some of it is made up to make it more whimsical.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here's my rule: Ask yourself, 'Did this thing happen?' If the answer is yes, then it's historical. Then ask, 'Did this thing happen precisely this way?' If the answer is yes, then it's history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it's historical drama.

A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

It's good to stay as close to real life as you can, and then kind of dress it up.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life.

The best way to spoil a good story is by sticking to the facts.

If you want to draw people into the story, you really have to write as if you're writing a novel and make these actually-existing people, including the actually-existing person with my name, into a believable person on the page. And that requires distance. That requires not being right up against the events you're talking about.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.

I don't want people thinking they know me instead of the character. Steve McQueen has loads of stories about him - who knows what's true? But it's great for people to fictionalize rather than know the truth.

I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.

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

The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She's taken on a life of her own, of course.

When I'm singing 'Deanna,' for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.

Whenever Hollywood gets involved with real life events, certain liberties have to be taken.