Celeste Ng Quotes

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

I think one of the reasons that I like fiction versus nonfiction is that I myself can kind of disappear from the story.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

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.

One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

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

I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

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.

It's no sin to tell a good story.

I have a longing for fiction, to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

I've been into short stories ever since I read an Angela Carter collection when I was a teenager.

I love to read stories. And I don't to get to talk about my favorite novels very often in my job.

Fiction is organized gossip.

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

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.

I'm trying to tell a story and do it truthfully.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.