Fiction Appreciation Quotes

When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.

I read all kinds of novels, as long as they're good.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

I can enjoy 'Harry Potter' and 'Star Trek,' but I really appreciate hard science fiction.

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.

I was an English major in college, I went to a creative-writing program, and all my life, I really read and thought about fiction as a craft and an art form. I feel like I know a lot about it, and can trust my instincts.

When I first encountered the 'Sigma Force' novels - long before I became friends with Jim Rollins - a bookseller told me that these stories were about 'geeks with guns.' While not entirely accurate, that's pretty close to the mark, and that really speaks to me.

I mostly associated video game storytelling with unforgivable clumsiness, irredeemable incompetence - and suddenly, I was finding the aesthetic and formal concerns I'd always associated with fiction: storytelling, form, the medium, character. That kind of shocked me.

I'm easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else's head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.

I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poets and novelists we read.

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

I read 'Pushing the Limit' and 'Dare You To' by Katie McGarry. Fantastic stuff. I had never read young adult before, but now I'm a believer.

My wife, the actress Megan Mullally, was an English major at Northwestern University and loves fiction. Like so many things in my life, she curates things for me. For example, I have the daunting prospect of Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" waiting for me when I get through my current reading pile.

I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.

I had been very dismissive of popular fiction - in fact, I'd refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren't the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way.

I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.

People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they'll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read.

I read 'Jaws' and 'The Godfather' back to back one summer when I was 14 and was suddenly aware of how powerful fiction could be.

I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left.

I was working at a mall bookstore when my manager recommended Sharon Shinn's 'Archangel.' I remember standing in the back room, alone, by the small desk there, reading the generous blurb the author had received from Peter S. Beagle. I read that book and enjoyed myself enough to pick up its sequel, 'Jovah's Angel.' And that's when I fell in love.

American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.

I'm reading Our Ecstatic Days, by Steve Erickson. It's an extraordinary journey and the most exciting thing I've found since The Master and Margarita, which I've read about 20 times. I like being taken away somewhere by a book.

I love Martin Amis.