Quotes About Fiction

Een van de dingen die ik leerde tijdens het schrijven van de roman, en ik heb er veel geleerd, was hoe moeilijk het is om nie te hechten aan de valse schijn van waarheid die een geschreven pagina wekt.

It's only a story. None of it really happened. How could it? How could such people be? The prisoner is probably a professor. The sheriff loses the next election. The truck driver died of emphysema. And as for the cowboy, that character, why nobody even knows where he is anymore. Or even, to be honest, if he ever really was.

A play is fiction -- and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Gatsby was great, but most unlikely. Gatsby was too unreal. Although I thought Fitzgerald wrote as well as any American novelist in the twentieth century, Gatsby was as far from truth as Fu Manchu. He was too soft to be what he was storied to be. Gatsby might be a cat burglar, but Gatsby was definitely not a gangster. He lacked the force of will to compel tough men to his bidding simply by force of will. He failed another test; he was too weak for a broad.

Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life down here.

There ain't no such animal.

Always tell the truth. Even if you have to make it up.

Their words seemed to them as idle tales.

Victory is a political fiction.

I'm just giving you some spiel, the ludicrous plot of a novel, a story I invented to touch your heart—one-third bullshit, one-third booze, and one-third genuine tenderness, you know the kind of thing.

Os romances maus contam histórias, os bons romances mostram-nos a nós mesmos.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Some stories," she says, "can be both false and true at the same time.

And the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you'll never believe a word of it, and yet' – she taps the end of his nose – 'it's true.

But this was just a story they told to comfort themselves.

Or maybe the stone was never real at all. Maybe it was all hoax, all story.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio K

what I really wanted to do was write a story that was all backstory, in which multiple protagonists, none of whom are exactly likable, wake up, tell lots of different stories inside the story, argue significant moral points, then wake up a second time and realize the whole thing was a dream.

It is possible that Octavian arranged for Cleopatra's murder and put about the fiction that she killed herself.

But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that's one of the reasons we enjoy it.

It's strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery? And what is it that attracts us? The crime, or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable?

That's why life is so different to fiction. Every day is a single page and you have no chance to thumb forward and see what lies ahead.

But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative.

But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that's ones of the reasons we enjoy it.