The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing – and everything – about it is real.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

T.G.T.B.T: too good to be true.

A good book isn’t written, it’s rewritten.

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational...

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end...

Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth...

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”[Q&A with...

A related question is where in time to begin. Should you begin far back in a character’s past and move forward, or should you begin in the present and make use of flashbacks only where...

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our...

There were no absolutes in fiction, no certain way to deliver what was needed. So it was no surprise most technical writers considered novel-writing a gateway to madness.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

Why should I want to make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot...

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.