Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

I never thought I could write fiction.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

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

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

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 don't write a lot of fiction.

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

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

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.

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.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.