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I generally find fiction without some move to the weird, less imaginative, dull, prosaic. Not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. I suppose it's just a question of taste.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

There's always a bit of fiction in everything that I write.

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

I think of fiction as the highest calling. I'm kind of addicted to it. It's the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life.

Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

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.

But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.