Quotes About Fiction

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

Stories to read are delitabill (delightful) Suppose that they be nocht but fable (fiction) Then should stories that suthfast were (truthful) - And they were said in good manner - Have double pleasure in hearing. The first pleasance is the carping (reading aloud) And the tothir the suthfastness That shows the thing richt as it was;

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

The house of fiction has many windows ... sometimes such a simple thing as suggesting to a student that perhaps realism instead of fantasy may be a more sympathetic genre, or humor instead of the opposite, or the novel rather than the short story--sometimes a simple suggestion like that can be the one that makes things click.

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

When we read Victorian novels, we are often misled into thinking how close that age is to our own; but when we encounter historical fiction of the period we recognize something equally powerful: the nineteenth century's strange otherness, the mark of its and our own historicity.

If the original of any of your characters would win a libel case against you, you have failed to create a real character.

So I awoke, and behold it was a dream.

The name of the one was Obstinate and the name of the other Pliable.

He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie [...] He needed a _history_, a sense of self. [Burnside on his father, p. 22]

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

For as 'Wright's Ninth Rule of Writing' states, every story teaches a moral, whether intended by the author or not.

This far, indeed, we differ from each other, in that everyone appropriates to himself some peculiar error; but we are all alike in this, that we substitute monstrous fictions for the one living and true God—

Dickens' hypocrites are the prime beneficiaries of his inventive genius. The heroes and heroines have no imagination. We could scrap all the solemn parts of his novels without impairing his status as a writer. But we could not remove Mrs. Gamp or Pecksniff or Bounderby without maiming him irreparably.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly that we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

simply telling the truth wasn't half enough. It still has to be brought to fictional life.

it was imaginative people who tended to lie. Lying required making stuff up, and only imaginative people were good at that.

Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.

This world was not like the world of his stories.

Most writers tend to create characters who are like them – only slightly better looking, taller, younger and more witty

He had counted so carefully. He had abided by the rules, but life had cheated. This world was not like the world of his stories.

The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers.

They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves.