Away Quote by Jon McGregor

All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that…

— Jo Nesbo

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing…

— Hallie Ephron

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

— Ian Rankin

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

— Wole Soyinka

“I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned,…

— Ian McEwan

With '44 Scotland Street' I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional…

— Alexander McCall Smith

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

— Ben Rhodes

I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.

— Kate Adie

Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced…

— Azar Nafisi

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

— Vladimir Nabokov

“Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories…

— Elif Shafak

“I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from…

— Neil Gaiman