Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn’t be escapism. – Maggie Stiefvater
Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood’s complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we’d say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction). – Edmund White
‘The New Yorker’s fiction podcast I like a lot, where they have authors pick short stories by other authors that appeared in ‘The New Yorker.’ – Gillian Jacobs
It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised. – David Leavitt
When I was younger, I was drawn to Ayn Rand books and other works of fiction celebrating individualism. – David Harsanyi
I’ve said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense. – George R. R. Martin
I’m not a representative of Pakistan; I’m just an example that Pakistanis are different from each other. I believe it in my fiction and I believe it personally. – Mohsin Hamid
It’s true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it’s David Foster Wallace’s, or John Cheever’s, or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s. – David Shields
In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart. – China Mieville
I’m able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are. – Curtis Sittenfeld
If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn’t the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction? – Darin Strauss
I go to readings by fiction writers like Alice Walker, and I’m envious of the level of attention they generate. – Derrick Bell
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t. – Neil Gaiman
I’m just interested in serialization in fiction. I’m fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I’m interested in ways to bring that back to fiction. – Jennifer Egan