Quotes About Fiction

Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.

Unlikely though it may seem today, the nineteenth century was indeed a time when it was assumed, in both fiction and geology, that Nature was moderate and orderly: this was a distinctive mark of a new and 'modern' worldview.

I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn't believe it.

Without stories, we'd have even more trouble recognizing what's real.

I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left...

once you set up your story, you should step into it and write as if you are living in that fictional dream. The result would be a story that would make readers feel that they, too, were in a seamless story, a dream.

Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking. "I

any legend is not worth making up if it does not include a murder or two.

When we as writers take our fears, beliefs, imaginations, and research and offer them up for the Lord to use, we are changed, and our fiction carries the power of truth and the fingerprints of our God on every page.

Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.

What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting… I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.

Yet my friend Natasha [Troubetskoia]† swears that Dostoevsky was a great liar and you could hardly find a Nastasia, an "idiot," or a Stavrogin in Russia.

Istoria este ficÅ£iunea care s-a întâmplat. FicÅ£iunea este istoria care s-ar fi putut întâmpla

We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don't, it is heartbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies. The sensation I felt that evening--that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth--it was a fearful loneliness.

ABOVE: An artist's impression of what it would look like if Mr Big Nose's nose exploded.

For whatever the power of truth may be, literature's own special power has always lain in fiction. That wonder we construct. It is the invention that unbreaks the heart and brings us into hope and peace and love.

Or was he the romantic fiction of a girl who'd been desperate for a handsome stranger to come along?

You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won't have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.

the Bobbsey Twins

not sure what to do about her "date." Then she simply pulled a name out of the air. "With Winston Churchill," she replied, taking the chance that Liz wouldn't know who he was. Apparently she didn't. "Yeah, he goes to high school," continued Kristy nonchalantly, getting into her story. "A sophomore. Football player … Me? I'm in seventh…. Yeah, I know.

Novel: A small tale, generally of love.

which has the power or quality of adding. The additory fiction gives to a great man a larger share of reputation than belongs to him, to enable him to serve some good end or purpose.Arbuthnot'sArt of political Lying.