Quotes About Fiction

history is filled with fictional people. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary - made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

But I know now that isn't true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn't exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary—made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary, made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary—made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

LIBRARY, where they keep the truth serum, and the magic carpets" -Kevin 'Freak' from Freak's Dictionary --"Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick pg 165

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.

If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

Once you've sharpened your observation skills and taken notes about what you've seen, you need to create the little world in your mind where your story will take place. Because if it doesn't exist there, it won't stand a chance of existing in your reader's mind.

Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littre says so and he's never wrong. And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes. It's on the other side of life.

Viaggiare, è proprio utile, fa lavorare l'immaginazione. Tutto il resto è delusione e fatica. Il viaggio che ci è dato è interamente immaginario. Ecco la sua forza. Va dalla vita alla morte. Uomini, bestie, città e cose, è tutto inventato. E' un romanzo, nient'altro che una storia fittizia. Lo dice Littrè, lui non sbaglia mai. E poi in ogni caso, tutti possono fare altrettanto. Basta chiudere gli occhi. E' dall'altra parte della vita.

Have you ever read stories that weren't true? demanded Paula.

Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than to construct fictitious ones.

Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? Yet they live eternally because—live germs as they were—they had the fortune to find a fecundating matrix, a fantasy which could raise and nourish them: make them live for ever!

I can't believe how many students don't read. They want to be writers, but they haven't read anything at all. They have looked at book covers, which usually allows them enough expertise to sneer, but they haven't read the books. How many young poets don't like poetry? How many fiction writers don't know Lehane from Nevada Barr?

What did I expect him to say--that he would leave his wife? To do so was the province of fiction. Real life was not as easy as that.

Não confunda o romance com a vida, ou viverá desgraçada.

One of the problems of being a storyteller is the cultivated ability to extrapolate; in every situation all the what ifs come to me.

All of Madeleine's writing, fiction and nonfiction, was an example of how all narrative is fiction, and all fiction can be true.

It is not only in the religious writings of various peoples that I find truth. I find that my forbearance is widened, my understanding of human potential expanded, as I read fiction, even if it is only to disagree with a narrow or ugly view of life, or to turn away from discontent. The fiction to which I turn and return is that which has a noble understanding of God's purpose for all that has been created.

Fiction, in a less direct way, will teach me, teach me things I would never learn had I not opened myself to them in story.

That's what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

Everywhere there are the politicians and the priest, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain that reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the novelist, those deep bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction.