Quotes About Fiction

Story of O is a fairy tale for another world, a world where some part of me lived for a long time, a world that no longer exists except between the covers of a book.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal "Once upon a time.

If you stretch your imagination, I'll tell you all a tale, about a time when everything wasn't up for sale.

Myths are a waste of time. They prevent progression.

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlet O'Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot – were more real than the real people I knew.

To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers?

Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you are getting to know better every day, something is bound to happen.

I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women.

You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world.

Some characters in fiction and our families exist as levers, to turn everything upside down and thereby knock out of the park some of our old presumptions, pretensions, convictions, and illusions of safety. These people, both in fiction and at the holiday table, tend to be annoying and on the margins.

In good fiction, we have one eye on the hero or the good guys and a fascinated eye on the bad guys, who may be a lot more interesting. The plot leads all of these people (and us) into dark woods where we find, against all odds, a woman or a man with the compass, and it still points true north. That's the miracle, and it's astonishing. This shaft of light, sometimes only a glimmer, both defines and thwarts the darkness.

Money is largely a fiction, a piece of paper that represents real assets, or the trust that assets exist. Take away this trust and it is worth nothing.

I wouldn't write a book to tell you that a vampire was happy.

It's hard to imagine Buffy the Vampire Slayer without Interview with the Vampire.

In fiction if nowhere else, I must have a little meaning, a little coherence, or I will go mad.

The Vampire Lestat here.

But before we cut to Present Time, let me have my little fantasy. I need it (Chapter 1).

I know nothing of those heroes of macabre facts masquerading as fiction.

I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much for reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

Alice often liked to imagine that a book was being written about her life. A narrator with an authoritative male voice was describing her every act. "Alice sighed" was a frequent observation.

Happy endings are popular. Do you not watch movies? Yeah, but that's movies, Darcy groaned. Books are above all that!

I've always thought that science and fiction writing have a lot in common because they're both about modeling reality.