We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.

I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn’t exist.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

…all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s...

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors–we hope–of your life come from reading fiction.

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..

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...