Quotes About Fiction

Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction).

I've read a thousand private-eye novels.

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it's the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the story.

Don't ever trust anyone who's writing a book. They make up lies for a living.

For Raintree County is not the country of the perishable fact. It is the country of the enduring fiction. The clock in the Court House Tower on page five of the "Raintree County Atlas" is always fixed at nine o'clock, and it is summer and the days are long.

As a man writes his fiction, his fiction is writing him. We can never change ourselves back into what we were, any more than I can change these printed words. So we have to be careful about what we write.

If you should stick only to what you know, we should worry about the thousands of authors who write about murder. If

Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.

I loved Mr. Darcy far more than any of my own husbands.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

My latest novel is A Striking Woman (Ottawa, Baico, 2023, $28, [email protected]

In this confusing state of affairs when each fact is immediately contrasted with a counter-fact and everyone is branded a liar, when the word truth can be used only in apology and within quotation marks, it seems that the only object that can claim total honesty is fiction itself.

Myths are lies; but I believe in the power of myths the way I believe in rocks.

Na kraju, zar jedan od razloga moje otu?enosti i distanciranosti od ljudi što me okružuju nije bio taj što me?u njima nisam uspijevao prona?i ljude koja sam upoznao i prigrlio u romanima?

death is a fiction created by ignorant people. Death is the creation of the unaware, because if you are aware, it is life, life and life alone—moving from one dimension of Existence to another.

Stories can be true without being literally and factually true.

The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don't ever ask for the true story.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

Si sólo es un cuento, parece menos espantoso.

The subliterary fiction she was churning out was many decades away from being in any way respectable. There was a small group that confessed to reading The Lord of the Rings, though you had to justify it through an interest in Old Norse.

Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it; but a myth is a story of a certain kind. The myths of a culture are those stories it takes seriously—the ones that are thought to be a key to its identity.