Imagination it turns out is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing which means in one sense that none of it is true. Yet in the writing and perhaps in the reading some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known using that as scaffolding and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

For someone who writes fiction in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious it's essential to be free.

I know how fiction matters to me because if I want to express myself I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Some major writers have a huge impact like Ayn Rand who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction but it really isn't fiction at all.

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire Barack Obama is president of the United States is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

With fiction you can talk about plot character and narrative whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

The general consensus among historians among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is in fact historical fiction is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that beyond that we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.

My mother whom I love dearly has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce step-children dysfunction and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

Irish fiction is full of secrets guilty pasts divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

For one who reads there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived for fiction biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world in all periods of time.

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Republicans and Democrats have used accounting gimmicks and competing government analyses to deceive the public into believing that 2 + 2 = 6. If our leaders cannot agree on the numbers if 'facts' are fictional how can they possibly have a substantive debate on solutions?

What does it say about a president's policies when he has to use a cartoon character rather than real people to justify his record? What does it say about the fiction of old liberalism to insist that good jobs and good schools and good wages will result from policies that have failed us time and again?

Julia progresses from cradle to grave showing how government makes every good thing in her life possible. The weak economy high unemployment falling wages rising gas prices the national debt the insolvency of entitlements - all these are fictionally assumed away in a cartoon that is produced by a president who wants us to forget about them.

The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Blade Runner appears regularly two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction urban future and it's why I've never re-visited that area because I feel I've done it.