“Characters in novels are all fiction like the world they live in.”
Chin Wag At The Slaughterhouse (2013)
Context: Characters in novels are all fiction like the world they live in. Of course Vivien Lash has things in common with me but if she actually was me I wouldn’t have been able to invent her. And I’m not plotting to murder my husband!
The closest connection between me and my characters is that we live in a city that’s recognisable as London, but it’s a version of London that came out of my head.
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Carole Morin 23
British writerRelated quotes
Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
“This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.”
“Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.”
Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 6
Hamlet, Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick and others
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind”
mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
"Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Crash (1973)
“I do not use profanity in my novels. My characters all go to church.”