“As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.” WayWritingMadeUseMemoriesFictionHappenedNeededMy FamilyMeaningfulNovelistsMatureWriting Fiction Author:Ayelet Waldman
“The day I was born songs were on records, phones were tied down, computers needed rooms and the web was fiction. Change the world. You can.” WorldSongBornRoomsFictionRecordsNeededComputerPhonesChanging The WorldTied Author:Steve Jobs
“When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.” WritingChildrenLiteratureFictionFourNeededComfortableLegsGenreHeightChairsLength Author:Mark Haddon
“I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.” WritingStoriesJobsInterestingPoorFictionCoupleNeededMagazinesShort StoryNon FictionStory Writers Author:David Foster Wallace
“Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened.” GivingFictionStepsHappenedEventsNeededDistanceExplaining Author:Kathleen Rooney
“I more seriously considered publishing it under a pseudonym than I considered publishing it as fiction. I think the decision to write it as nonfiction happened at the very outset of the process, because the overwhelming impetus for writing this book was to understand what the experience meant, and to override my own reductions and rationalizations, whatever story I had that was not true. It didn't sit well with me and I needed to answer that. That's sort of the reason I write everything.” ThinkingWritingWellsBookReasonStoriesProcessMy OwnDecisionAnswersFictionHappenedNeededOverwhelmingNonfictionPublishingReductionImpetusPseudonyms Author:Melissa Febos
“It is a work of psychogeography, albeit in a less explicit sense than Iain Sinclair's or Will Self's. It had to be fiction though, because I needed that freedom of including whatever belonged, and cutting out whatever didn't. The main fiction in it was matching Julius' generous and self-concealing character to New York's generous and self-concealing character. I think this also adds to my answer about New York's personality in the book.” ThinkingBookSelfCharacterAnswersFictionCuttingNew YorkPersonalityNeededAddIncludingGenerousExplicitMatchingJuliusConcealing Author:Teju Cole
“Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person's felt sense of gender was therefore "unreal." That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported.” PeopleThinkingFeelsPersonsBodyRealitySexFeltPayAttentionFictionNeededDemandAspectIntentionGenderPrimariesUrgentUnrealTrans Author:Judith Butler