Quotes About Fiction

It's not that I'm apolitical... In my youth, I was a freelance political speechwriter, which taught me a lot about writing fiction, I must add.

I try to think of the social function of fiction as drawing the individual toward larger social and political questions. But I'm also very comfortable in saying that my novel - any novel - doesn't matter as much as larger questions of how we can see justice done.

When I am telling it, it doesn't seem as if it was only made up. It seems more real than you are -- more real than the schoolroom. I feel as if I were all the people in the story -- one after the other. It is queer.

It IS a story, said Sara. EVERYTHING'S a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.

This novel was in a sense developed in stages. First published as a series in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1887 as Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin's, it proved extremely popular and Burnett followed this with an equally popular dramatisation of the serial, re-named The Little Princess. Burnett was then persuaded to re-write the fictional version under the new name, whilst including the numerous amendments she had made to the story in the play.

They were as real as Sara, and it was careless of them not to come out of the story shadowland and say, "Here I am — tell about me." But they did not — which was their fault and not mine. People who live in the story one is writing ought to come forward at the beginning and tap the writing person on the shoulder and say, "Hallo, what about me?" If they don't, no one can be blamed but themselves and their slouching, idle ways.

At least the girls in stories were alive before they died.

Reading can show you how capacious and stretchy fiction is, how much it can accommodate, and how far it has expanded beyond the straight and narrow path from point A to point B.

Fiction can serve in a non-threatening way to open minds and, I hope, hearts to the Word of God.

But I killed you, said Alyss. Did you? Redd turned to The Cat. Why wasn't I informed? --The Looking Glass Wars

Myths are not fiction, but history seen with a poet's eyes and recounted in a poet's terms.

Paul hesitated. There'd been no dwarf in the vision, but all else remained identical.

Kafka's fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It's a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there's no map.

I do not see the world at all; I invent it.

Between the fictional Laura of the books and the even more heavily fictionalized girl of the TV show, we've tended to lose sight of the fact that Laura Ingalls Wilder was a real person who was complicated and intense.

When you are on assignment, you stick to the facts, limit your vision, and often cut out the most revealing material. There is no texture, no shades of gray. In fiction, you can bring the reader on the perilous journey with your characters as they discover that war is more like a wilderness of mirrors, full of danger and uncertainty.

Healthy fiction, no matter how wildly it may depart from the material order, teaches us to love ourselves in a wholesome manner by loving our neighbor. Indeed, even by loving our enemies - at least by trying to learn to love them, and by believing that it is right to do so. With grace this is possible.

If I want to speculate wildly about the future, I have my science fiction. Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is either crazy or lying.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.

I don't read a lot of fiction, but one of my favorite authors is William Kennedy; his books, to me, almost read like historical dramas because the mythologies are so detailed as he wove fiction with the factual history of Albany.

I love William Gibson.

Nobody wants to read about the honest lawyer down the street who does real estate loans and wills. If you want to sell books, you have to write about the interesting lawyers - the guys who steal all the money and take off. That's the fun stuff.

If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.