I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Personally, I read fiction, in part, because I get to spend time with people who aren't my people.
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
I love historical fiction because there's a literal truth, and there's an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.
Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.
I just love historical fiction.
I think fiction, for me, is a way of trying to understand why people do the things they do - and trying to explain what is, at heart, illogical.
I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.
If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.