Books Quote by Michel Houellebecq

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to…

— Orson Scott Card

I've written 17 novels, and I've found out that fiction can't keep up with real life.

— John Grisham

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

— Manuel Puig

Now that I no longer feel lonely, and now that my own past feels resolved in a whole new and very deep way, I…

— Kate Christensen

the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

— Penelope Lively

Writing fiction is ... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

— Rose Wilder Lane

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know…

— Hunter S. Thompson

“Writers of literature, if they are real writers, know that their readers are confused about reality and the emotions derived from that reality and…

— Noah Cicero

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people…

— Nick Earls

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how…

— Dana Spiotta

“A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as…

— Barbara Kingsolver

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs,…

— Mark Leyner