Quotes About Fiction

McCracken's latest novel straddles the line between fiction and memoir, though she rejects the term "autofiction" as sounding "like it might be written by a robot, or a kiosk, or a European.

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up.

It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.

I said on the phone to my mother, "I think I'm going to write the story of the Burgess kids." "It's a good one," she agreed. "People will say it's not nice to write about people I know." My mother was tired that night. She yawned. "Well, you don't know them," she said. "Nobody ever knows anyone.

In 1890, Donnelly published Caesar's Column, a dystopian science fiction novel set in the far-off 1980s, when the United States had become a capitalist tyranny controlled by a ruthless Jewish oligarchy.

Mandates were largely a fiction, of course. The distinction between "mandate" and "colony," especially in highly colonized Africa, was meaningless. But the idea provided a fig leaf for Wilson's insistence that the Paris conference not become the tool of European imperialism. France and Britain accepted Wilson's phony compromise.

Ockham didn't use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn't true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn't mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.

I am the master of fantasy.

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.

Después resulta fácil continuar, porque si en la realidad hay muchas cosas que suceden por azar, en la ficción casi todo discurre según reglas lógicas.

Ésa es nuestra auténtica patria común: relatos fieles no a lo que los hombres ven, sino a lo que los hombres sueñan

I'm not quite sure what freedom is, but I damn know well what it ain't. How have we gotten so silly, I wonder. I get back off into Baldwin. I don't give a damn if Sag Harbor sags into oblivion. Me and James Baldwin are communicating. His fiction is more real than this reality.

By living a life "against nature," the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.

I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.

Quiero decir que me violaron y me arrojaron bajo un puente... -¡Parece de novela! -suspiró Sui. -Sí, muchacha. Todo lo que es verdadero parece de <>, aun cuando la novela sólo relata hechos ficticios

Quiero decir que me violaron y me arrojaron bajo un puente... -¡Parece de novela! -suspiró Sui. -Sí, muchacha. Todo lo que es verdadero parece de "novela", aun cuando la novela sólo relata hechos ficticios

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

It is precisely because of the unstable and unpredictable nature of life and history that we draw on fiction to lend in retrospect sense, unity, and dignity to fragmented lives and times.

Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

By all the rules of modern fiction there should have been gunsmoke mingling its acrid blue with the brown haze of corral dust. Dead men should have fallen and been trampled... Nothing of this sort happened.

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.

A novel is not a rant.

I wrote 'The Match,' my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction.