Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.
John UpdikeWhy does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
John UpdikeSchool is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John UpdikeMy father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.
John Updike