In real life, if you really enjoy somebody’s company, and you have a great time with them, and then you’re supposed to – becoming two lovers who are having a great time in their own fictional world, I think it bleeds into reality and vice versa.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
For me, there’s a fine line between telling a story that’s fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it’s bloodless, a little too fictional.
Like the sand and the oyster, it’s a creative irritant. In each poem, I’m trying to reveal a truth, so it can’t have a fictional beginning.
What we’re doing on ‘The West Wing’ is fictional. It’s not a place to learn about politics or government. Has there ever been a fundraiser on ‘The West Wing?’ No. So right there, you’re in Disneyland.
In real constabularies, the relevant department that is the subject of ‘Line of Duty’ is called Professional Standards. However, ‘Line of Duty’ is set in a fictional anticorruption department, AC-12, in order to prevent any unintentional resemblance to actual units, cases, or individuals.
Creating the fictional background for a game world isn’t significantly different from creating a background for fiction.
Any time you read the snide comments or people who have a hard time separating fictional television from reality, that’s sort of just water under the bridge. It’s easy to let that pass by if everyone in person is nice and warm.
As far as I am concerned, Don Quixote is the most metal fictional character that I know. Single handed, he is trying to change the world, regardless of any personal consequences.
I don’t want at the end of my life to look back at just a bunch of fictional movies I was involved in that kept taking me away from the real world.
Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they’re constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.
Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you’re a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.
My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.
I didn’t even know what a beauty editor was. It sounds like a fictional job if you think about it. You get to test lipstick and perfume and nail polish legitimately and call it work.
Fictional realms are usually terrible places to vacation, as they tend to be full of monsters and conflicts – Narnia and Middle-earth would both be good places to get killed – but I wouldn’t mind visiting the worlds of Iain M. Banks’s ‘Culture.’ You’d just have a hard time getting me to leave.
I tried to write about my first marriage in a fictional version but got two pages into it and realised it was too personal. Then I came up with an old-fashioned love triangle, which became the plot for ‘Ralph’s Party.’
People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can’t find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort – and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.
The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
I wrote and drew my own books on notebook paper, and I’d staple ’em together. I had my own fictional company, and we had our own thinly veiled offshoots of whatever was popular at Marvel and DC at the time.
My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made him uniquely him is out there, on another plane. So inventing the fictional afterlife in ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ was a way of making that wish real.
My husband saw me go through the 2008 campaign cycle. We did it together for Sarah Palin and John McCain. It ended disastrously, and afterward I really wanted to do something different, so I started writing novels, and I imagined a fictional female president in my head.
I think it’s nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.
Eleanor Oliphant isn’t me or anyone I know. Of course I’ve felt loneliness – everybody does – but Eleanor and her experiences are fictional.
You can turn on Fox News almost any day and see some fictional story about voter fraud, the whole purpose of which is to limit voting by the poor, the elderly, college students and minorities.
When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.
This is magic we’re talking about. It’s supposed to go places science can’t, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own.
‘Line of Duty’ had originally been conceived as a returnable drama, with the premise being that the fictional anticorruption unit AC-12 would move on to a new case in each series, centred on a high-profile antagonist accused of corruption.
The genealogy of fictional characters can become an obsession, like train-spotting, and should be firmly resisted.
I remember someone told me Donald Trump may not leave after the election. It seemed like a fictional, almost science-fiction idea.
I love to have real people of history interact with my fictional characters. History gives me the plot. I research the period meticulously, and then I blend in a romantic and sensual love story to give it balance. The heavier the history, the more romantic the couple must be.
When you’re portraying someone, whether they’re real or fictional, you have to find some kind of hook where it feels real to you because if you don’t believe it yourself, then no one else is going to believe it.
Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. Not in the Asperger’s, autistic way depicted in the very fictional movie ‘The Social’ Network, the cognitive genius of exceptional ability. That’s a modern definition that reduces the original meaning.
I have been challenged with the fictional languages I have to learn. I wasn’t terrible at languages at school – I got an A in French, so I did well enough – but I didn’t enjoy them. I’m not even sure if that plays into how well you learn a fictional language!
We, people, are so very, very complicated that no matter how well drawn a fictional character is, they can’t get anywhere near as complex as a real person.
I’m always depressed when a book ends, because those are my friends for however long the book takes to write. Since I spend so many hours with these fictional people, I sometimes see them more than my real friends. And then they’re gone, and we’ll never be together like that again.
I do not believe that with a fictional character you can force yourself too far away from yourself. There has to be some of you in it.
I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives.
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
I think there’s a moral imperative when you’re writing fictional heroes to give characters who somehow give us something to aspire to as opposed to dragging them down to our level.
As soon as I started reading, I found myself drawn to fictional character’s homes as much as I was to the characters themselves.
Television is full of fictional and real violence that’s turned into entertainment.
I had directed a short film called ‘Girvhi’ earlier, on child labour. It was a fictional story. At that time, I realised I could direct a film if given a chance.
If I had to get lost in a fictional world? I would love to go with those Hemingway characters in ‘The Sun Also Rises’ when they go on that trip in Spain, and they go fishing. And they take the wine bottles, and they put them in the river.
It might be the history major in me, but I look to the past when I try to construct my fictional futures.
What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.
It can be a fictional character and yet relatable… It always depends on the content of the film and what you are doing.
I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing ‘Cum Laude.’ So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby… but the students and cast of characters are fictional.
I love when you get the feeling of some social reality with a fictional film.
In my older songs, I used to hide behind fictional characters to deflect attention away from myself.
‘Lucky Us’ ends with a description of a photograph of the novel’s fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.
I don’t put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction – looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That’s a science fictional tool.
Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding – the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame.
