Quotes About Fiction

Medical school had been a time for imaginary diseases and Martin had contracted almost all of them.

I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

It didn't matter that I sat alone at lunchtimes and rarely got invited to parties. My fictional friends were just as real, and when I closed a book at night I knew they would still be there in the morning

Does Playboy still run fiction?" "I have absolutely no idea, Melinda," he said, grinning.

When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it's like I go back into the dream.

Stories," she says, "are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.

I don't even like horror movies. The world has enough real monsters without creating fictional monsters.

Memory is elastic, and no two people have the same version of any given event. Our versions of our own lives are necessarily fictional to some degree, wouldn't you agree?

What is the difference between fiction and memoir, really? I mean, isn't there a bit of autobiography in every novel? And isn't there a bit of fiction in every memoir? Memory is elastic, and no two people have the same version of any given event. Our versions of our own lives are necessarily fictional to some degree, wouldn't you agree?

One of the best things you can relate to is a detailed story.

If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?

Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.

There is an exuberance in good fantasy quite unlike the most exalted moments of realistic fiction. Both forms have similar goals; but realism walks where fantasy dances.

Writing for children can be completely honest in non-cynical ways. In adult books you're required to be cynical. It embarrasses us to say positive things. You can have affection and hope in children's books, but that is out of fashion in adult fiction.

Is—is Achren your mother?" Taran gasped and drew back fearfully. "Certainly not!" cried the girl. "I am Eilonwy

Dangers were no more than odd imaginings, like ghost stories that children made up to frighten one another: things that couldn't possibly happen.

The strangeness of the Barrayaran government system with all its unwritten customs, pressed on Cordelia not so much as first glance but gradually. And yet it seemed to work for them somehow. They made it work, pretending a government into existence. Perhaps all governments were all consensus fictions at their hearts.

I was imagining the most bizarre things befalling you." "Did they include a six-hundred-pound ice bear and a pirate poet?" "No…" "Then they weren't the most bizarre after all.

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it's the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.

I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story.

This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on--each knowing, really knowing, the answer.

It has often been said that we have but one life to live; that is nonsense. If one reads fiction he or she can live a thousand lives, in many parts of the world or in outer space.