Tom Bissell Quotes

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I never thought I could write fiction.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

I will never write fiction.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

In my books I try to tell a good story, not give messages.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.

I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division.

I don't think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.

Writing is so fun precisely because if you take out the right adjective, the readers can decide what kind of book is in their hands. Suspension of disbelief should not be mandatory in contemporary writing.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

I don't think I could write a straight drama.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.