A Quote by Edward Abbey

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written. — © Edward Abbey
It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.
I prefer non-fiction to fiction. In fact, I don't read fiction at all. I read books that are based on true events.
In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.
For me to play any true person in a film based on a true story, I always want to make sure that it doesn't mock and it certainly doesn't trivialize the events that took place.
I find it interesting that authors of fantasy and science fiction novels are rarely asked if their books are based on their personal experiences, because all writing is based on personal experience. I may not have gone on an epic quest through a haunted forest, but the feelings in my books are often based on feelings I've had. Real-life events, in fantasy and science fiction, can take on metaphorical significance that they can't in a so-called realistic novel.
In non-fiction you have to stay true to historical events, be they personal or national .
I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
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.
Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation.
Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.
Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.
Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.
Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless, and errant?
Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.
Surreal fiction is a sophisticated art form. Events happen divorced from conventional logic, as events in a dream may happen. But unlike dreams, everything in the story contributes to an overall coherent point, impression or emotion.
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
I've long been interested in the role of 'minor characters' in major events. This has been the focus of a lot of the fiction and nonfiction I've written.
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