“Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves - all plot and no characters, or made-up characters - Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.” ThinkingMenMadeWarCharacterHandsSeemsPerfectFictionFateMessPlotVietnamSessionFuryTanksRottenSyntheticBriefingSmall Hands Author:Wilfrid Sheed
“My fiction is almost always inspired by a character's need or desire to rise above him- or herself. No one is perfect and some of us have much adversity in our lives; it is those people who struggle to rise above their nature or background that I find the most interesting and heroic.” PeopleNeedsCharacterDesirePerfectInterestingFictionStruggleOur LivesAdversityInspiredBackgroundsHeroicRise AboveMost Interesting Author:Robert Crais
“I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.” BelieveFormI BelievePerfectFictionProseRambling Author:Ian Mcewan
“Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it's not that much fun. But they're fascinating to me as historical documents. Cabet [Icaria's founder and author of the utopian novel, Travels in Icaria], is writing in the 1830s, and his idea of the perfect society reveals a lot about his time. But his book is uniquely bad.” WritingBookIdeasFunPerfectFictionNovelHistoricalBoringFascinatingFoundersDocumentsUtopianPerfect Society Author:Christine Jennings
“Very, very often in movie sex you see this fiction about unity. A union. That somehow these two thinking beings become one, and there's one action and they're sort of perfectly in sync, and the lighting's perfect, and they've got their eyes closed, and they're gone, you know? And then you cut to someone having a cigarette. And it's all so much Novocain. Meanwhile, those of us us watching it are going "I'm never going to tell anybody, but I never have sex like that".” ThinkingKnowsTwoEyeActionSexPerfectFictionGoneCuttingUnionsUnityNow And ThenCigaretteLightingSync Author:Tilda Swinton