“Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.”

“Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”

“I opened the book to the title page, which said the book was "A Fictional Memoir." I had no idea what this meant, except that maybe it was one of the ways that Exley was crazy: maybe when he called his book a fictional memoir, it meant that he couldn't make up his mind, which is one of the things people really mean when they call someone crazy.”

“All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.”

“For one never makes a film out of nothing. To shoot a film is always to shoot something, be it fiction or reality, and the more shaky the reality, the more solid the fiction must be.”

“Good fiction makes the truth believable.”