Kevin Kwan Quotes

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

I've just always been very interested in story above all.

People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens.

As writers, our job is to try to create, in a fake space, something that feels true. That's just straight-up fiction: Invent a character that doesn't exist; make them seem like they do.

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

Everything in a story should be credible.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

I read a lot of fiction.