Quotes About Fiction

No one in life can ever match fiction

Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

I need to tease out how far I was to blame. You'll understand that, Dr Freud. Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name. (Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

Be so good as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that's what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.

Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism lacked.

This is our tragedy....our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn't understand it wasn't real.

I don't want to be elite. Am I elite?" "You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual." "Is that the same as fictional?" "Fiction's elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It's what people want.

We, for our own part, simply call ourselves we. We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

What is the use of stories that arent even true?

People tend to focus on the magic more than the realism. But, like all fiction, fantasy arrives at truth via the road of untruth.

Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real.

If one had never had the good fortune of meeting Borges, then meeting his library was the next best thing

Verhalen zijn niet waar, maar doordat ze onwaar zijn kunnen ze waarheden voelbaar en kenbaar maken die de waarheid niet kan vertellen.

He wanted to run but didn't know where or how, which made him more fearful still, because he knew that in his spy fiction he had already told himself the answer. You can run but you can't hide.

Anybody can tell stories,' Iff replied. 'Liars, and cheats, and crooks, for example. But for stories with that Extra Ingredient, ah, for those, even the best storytellers need the Story Waters. Storytelling needs fuel, just like a car; and if you don't have the Water, you just run out of Steam.

India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary;

Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.