A Quote by Siri Hustvedt

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Siri Hustvedt

Quote Topics

Fiction Happened Like Never Remembering Writing Writing Fiction

Quote Author

Siri Hustvedt
American - Novelist
Born: February 19, 1955

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

George R. R. Martin

Forgiving is not forgetting; its actually remembering--remembering and not using your right to hit back. Its a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you dont want to repeat what happened.

Desmond Tutu

I was a storyteller for The Band. It was never, 'Hey guys, here's a song about what happened to me.' I was always more comfortable writing fiction.

Robbie Robertson

Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!

Simon Sebag Montefiore

When you're writing a book that is going to be a narrative with characters and events, you're walking very close to fiction, since you're using some of the methods of fiction writing. You're lying, but some of the details may well come from your general recollection rather than from the particular scene. In the end it comes down to the readers. If they believe you, you're OK. A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing.

Samuel Hynes

To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago.

Matthew Perry

I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.

Philippa Gregory

I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

Andrew Lam

Remembering is a necessary rebuke to those who say the Holocaust never happened or has been exaggerated.

Kofi Annan

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Ayelet Waldman

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Alexander Chee

Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.

Vito Acconci

All of depiction is fiction, it's only a question of degree. When we think of images, such as the signing of the declaration of independence, we think of that wonderful John Trumbull painting Declaration of Independence that is at the Yale Art Gallery and on the back of our money. When we think of that historical moment we think of that image. That image never happened like that. All of those people were never in that room together to sign that paper. It's a beautiful fiction to help us have an understanding of what went on.

Titus Kaphar

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

Susan Choi

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.