I have often maintained that fiction may be much more instructive than real history.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common-a need to create an alternative world.

If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

Fiction is the microscope of truth.

Some things can only be said in fiction, but that doesn't mean they aren't true.

The few really great-the major novelists ... are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

Wondrous strong are the spells of fiction.

In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.