Quotes About Fiction

Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but...

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, ther would be no need for fiction.

The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She's taken on a life of her own, of course.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

All my life I have been reading romance novels. Those stupid books ruined me. I've always wanted that fire that every book I ever read talks about.

The crew and cast at Castle becomes more of a reality than the people I've known all my life

But real life is only one kind of life—there is also the life of the imagination.

Call me Dolores. Like they do in the stories.

There is no point to writing fiction without risks. I would rather anger a reader than bore her. I would rather speak my truth and be laughed at or ignored than stick to what is easy and familiar.

Taft gets hold of the wet baguette and hits Will with it.

I've been a little sad that so many girls love Tommy so much. Hello!?! Tommy Hazard and Prince Charming - neither one exists!

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.

for literature had always been a solace for him, something that the ugliness of facts could not spoil.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

In this regard it is perhaps appropriate to suggest instead that science fiction is the literature where we keep the beautiful ideas and throw out the data . . . namely, where we are free to conjure new realities that conform to our ideas. So it is that I am often unimpressed when people claim that science fiction anticipates science. It doesn't. The imagination of the natural world far exceeds that of even the most gifted science fiction writer.

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

When we speak of the commerce with our colonies, fiction lags after truth; invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

Scotland Yard isn't called in nearly as often as detective novelists seem to think