Graham Greene Quotes

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.

I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.

There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.