Allowed Quote by Laura van den Berg

I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

— Matthew Specktor

I think most fiction focuses on uncomfortable settings because that's interesting.

— N. K. Jemisin

Some acts of worldbuilding in fiction instantiate a milieu that is so culturally odd and exotic, so displaced from the audience's consensus reality in…

— Paul Di Filippo

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

— E. L. Doctorow

“Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well…

— Ian Leslie

With Bound, we wanted to pull at conventions, because you begin to wonder, Why do these stereotypes exist? Where do they come from? You…

— Anonymous

Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily…

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by…

— Truman Capote

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

— Emile M. Cioran

“all writers, given adequate technique—technique that communicates—can stir our interest in their special subject matter, since at heart all fiction treats, directly or indirectly,…

— John Gardner

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

— Colm Toibin

Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

— Mary Catherine Bateson