Quotes About Fiction

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

All forms of literature are dangerous; but in none is the danger more acute than in historical fiction...

Algunas historias es mejor no escribirlas. Si la escribes, entonces será real. Si solo la conservamos en nuestros recuerdos es como si nunca hubiera pasado, como si sólo hubiera sido un sueño o una alucinación propia de chalados. Nadie cree lo que decimos, pero si lo escribes eso le dará, no sé, cierto fundamento. Lo volverá real.

looseleft adj. feeling a sense of loss upon finishing a good book, sensing the weight of the back cover locking away the lives of characters you've gotten to know so well.

I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

Max Byrd's Grant.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatize that private world.

Like all the stories I wrote at that time, it was based on an unusual atmosphere that had impressed me in real life.

Steps Beach has, quite possibly, the most beautiful approach of any beach in the world. You descend forty-three steps into sand dunes covered by rosa rugosa, which in the height of summer blooms with pink and white flowers. Dionis Beach is where Richie is found asleep in his car in this novel. In the book, I say that Dionis has public showers—this is fiction. It does not have showers.

The thing I love best about reading fiction is that it gives you a way to connect the experiences of your own life to the larger world

I've spent my whole life reading beautiful books and watching beautiful movies, dreaming that there was some real place out there where I would fit and be beautiful, too.

Lies are stories.

All stories are true stories, or so Will tells me.

Why are people named Lovelace always villains when they appear in questionable literature? The only more certain moral doom lies in being namd Raffles.

Reality is seldom as melodramatic as entertainment. On the other hand, reality is more random, arbitrary, and dangerous than fiction, and it's my job to understand that to exact tolerances.

By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character "impossible" - each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.

Elizabeth Chadwick

But the point is that I didn't want this book to depict events with any accuracy. I am a fan of whatever you want to call this category of fiction in which authors use their real names for their character names.

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.

I learned that there are books and there are readers; given even the worst of circumstances, they get together. In the privacy of their own homes or on park benches or on public buses, in the corner of the reference room, at the end of an aisle of fiction, in the middle of the alphabet, they club up and conspire.

I've always hated the notion, in life or in fiction, that the human personality is a puzzle to be solved, that we are a single flashback away from understanding why this person is cruel to her children, why that man has a dreamy, downcast look. A human being is not a lock and the past is not a key.