Quotes About Fiction

I remember a television program I once saw; a rerun, made years before. I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.

He was not a monster, to her ... How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

Calling a piece of short fiction a "tale" removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales.

I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived..

It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe.

If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.

It was a problem in comic books: drawing an invisible man.

If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening. The

Stories are no good, not even the short ones, because by the time you get to the second page he's forgotten the beginning. Where are we without our plots?

There are two kinds of tales: one accurate but not true, the other true but not accurate.

Never trust a writer, he had warned me. All the world is ours to kidnap and transform as we will, to our own purpose.

Fiction is empathy technology.

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were--Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.

I learned a long time ago: You're in the entertainment business. You're not in the reality business. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.

The history needs to serve the story, not the story the history. But at the same time you can't stray too far.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

The opportunity to create a small world between two pieces of cardboard, where time exists yet stands still, where people talk and I tell them what to say, is exciting and rewarding.

As time goes on, thing do get made up.

Fantasy is so much hotter than reality most of the time.