All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.

All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers’ existence during the time the fiction was written.

Anyone can imagine a story. Writers imagine and get the story down on the page.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

Fiction is, the art of making up something. That's what it's all about, folks. Making stacks of money.

Everybody has their story to tell.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

I write fiction that revolves around archival research and historical events. What I search for in documented history: what happened, is not necessarily what I seek when I write it down: what was it like, and what was left out. I go back to something Breyten Breytenbach once told me, that fiction tells a truth that history cannot. I lean into fictive truths.

something that interests me is the fact that we continue to document things even if it's after the fact, even if it's a hundred years after the fact, to show that there were other voices, other points of view. I continue to do my work in historical fiction, but whoever we are and wherever we're living, the events around us continue to influence our view of history and we each continue to rewrite history in our own way. There is no set history. Each of us brings a new history to bear...I've done so much research with what's considered history that I've decided that it's just as fictional as fiction is. And many of the truths that I'm interested in telling need to be told in a narrative form, which history or anthropology or some other disciplines doesn't necessarily lend themselves to. People need to hear things in a certain way in order to understand them, and so I think that fiction in many ways tells truths that history is unable to tell.

The work of a fiction writer is to take narrow experiences and explore the emotional vastness that’s within them.

Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction—and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

I believe fiction is a search shared with the reader.

People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that. (p84)