A Quote by James McBride

The act of choosing what to place in your piece when you're a historian or a non-fiction writer already renders it into fiction for someone else. In some ways fiction comes a lot closer to reality. When you start talking about something as brutal as slavery and life in the American West, it's really important to take a non- judgmental stance. We romanticize a great deal about life in the American West, but I thank God I wasn't living during that time. No matter what color you were, it was rough, crude, tough living.

James McBride

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About Act American American West Brutal Choosing Closer Color Crude Deal Else Fiction Fiction Writer God Great Great Deal Historian Important Judgmental Life Living Lot Matter No Matter What Non-Fiction Piece Place Reality Really Rough Slavery Some Someone Something Stance Start Take Talking Thank Thank God Time Tough Ways Were West Writer Your

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James McBride
American - Writer
Born: September 11, 1957

The American West is just arriving at the threshold of its greatness and growth. Where the West of yesterday is glamorized in our fiction, the future of the American West now is both fabulous and factual.

Lyndon B. Johnson

This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Evidently, there are many great American writers. But sometimes it can feel as though American fiction is dominated by relatively linear narrative form, with a heavy emphasis on psychological realism. If you limit yourself to a certain kind of American literary fiction, it's easy to forget about the different kinds of books that are being written. You can forget to be ambitious, both as a reader and a writer.

Katie Kitamura

You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.

Annie Dillard

There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.

Michael Cunningham

The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.

George Pelecanos

In some ways I spend longer at non-fiction because there are a lot of different threads to bring together. But non-fiction is more reflective than immersive. The problem with fiction sometimes is that you have to leave the real world to enter the fictional one. And that takes so much, goes into your head for so long?.?.?.?I don't know, I just feel less inclined toward that these days, and more inclined to remain in my own life. I do like really good fiction, but it's getting harder to hold my attention in a novel.

Helen Humphreys

History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

Edward M. Lerner

I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it’s the fiction writer’s job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in.

Wells Tower

I think it's important to humanize history; fiction can help us remember. A lot of books I've read in the past have been so much more important than textbooks - there is an emotional connection with one particular person. I'm very much of a research-is-important type of fiction writer, even for contemporary fiction. I wrote about blogs in America and I've never blogged. But I read many, many blogs - usually about feminist things, or about race, or about hair.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Fiction always reveals a lot about the person who is writing it. That's the scary thing. Not in a straightforward autobiographical sense. But the flaws in a piece of fiction are, unhappily, so often also the flaws of the writer.

Katie Kitamura

Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.

Sloane Crosley

If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days.

Albert Brooks

Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.

James Cameron

One thing that I really love about making records is that you can flow through fiction and non-fiction but, ultimately, everything's a commentary on real life in some way.

Michelle Zauner

Reality and fiction are really mixed up. The frontier between reality and fiction is tremendously porous and slippery. And in fact, when I remember something that has happened to me a long time ago, let's say twenty years ago, many times I'm not sure if I have actually lived what I am recalling, or I have dreamed about it, or I have written about it, or I have imagined it all.

Rosa Montero

A Quote by James McBride

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