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An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

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.

Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical.

One of the questions writers bump up against in their work, whether they know it or not, is about lying. Because fiction is a form of deceit, and one's abilities are measured by how convincingly one can persuade readers that these events really happened.

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

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

I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.

Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.