Quotes About Fiction

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

Writing fiction is an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

The life of the mind is always more interesting than the real. The idea is often more interesting than the actual.

Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in MR. MURDER was pretty much out of my own life.

The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel.

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more.

75% of what happens to Paul Gascoigne in his life is fiction.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.

Besides the soothing effect it has, I think my favorite part of writing is being able to use my imagination and creativity to make new ideas and people and situations come to life.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

People have freaked out when I tell them that my dragons are scientifically based... what else can you call a genetically engineered life form?

It's fun to pretend you're good at something you know you wouldn't be good at in real life.

A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.

I've made out more this season on a family-friendly show than ever in my actual life.

We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.

It does not matter that Dickens' world is not life-like; it is alive.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.

It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.

I haven't personally in my real life had many people close to me die, but my characters have, and I've had to live that as though it's real. And it can take a really big emotional toll on someone.