Quotes About Fiction

the snake's-hands in a story can be the best part.

What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or — worse yet — leaving the blanks blank?

Im James Bond. Im Jason Bourne. Im Super-freaking-Mario come to life.

But for the greatest long - range murder ever committed in a locked room, gents, I commend you to one of the most brilliant short detective stories in the history of detective fiction. (In fact, it shares the honours for supreme untouchable top - notch excellence with Thomas Burke's The Hands of Mr Ottermole, Chesterton's The Man in the Passage, and Jacques Futrelle's The Problem of Cell 13.) This is Melville Davisson Post's The Doomdorf Mystery

That is, by the way, an introductory definition of a parable: a story that never happened but always does—or at least should.

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts...

What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?

Actually, the true story of a person's life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.

A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.

Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.

Reality always outstrips fiction. Whatever you make up, something more incredible always pops up in real life.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

I don't want to write my life. I live my life. I want to make up a new world.

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life.

There are lots of futurists that spend their whole life trying to figure out who we're going to be in 40, 50, 60, 100 years. That's the great thing about science fiction.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

After all, life is not a Hindi movie.

I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false.

Which is the supplement? Fantasy or daily routine?

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

And I realized again that real life is different from reel life.

Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.