Quotes About Fiction

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use.

I know a lot more about the 'Halo' universe than the fans do.

If it were not for the truth of fiction there would not be any truth at all.

Tulip: Okay, let me tell you what you're doing here-- you're writing a story. You've got the plot and dialogue from Melrose Place and fucking Baywatch, and you're writing yourself a little story in your head... The trouble is, you're using me as one of the characters.

too many fantasy novels

But all of these things now exist. (What? Hogwarts isn't real?)

There, I was ridiculed for being an inauthentic American, and now I am being charged with being an inauthentic Russian. I do not yet understand that this very paradox is the true subject of so-called immigrant fiction.

The best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion. It contrasts the banality of our self-made fictions against the hopelessness of the world as it really is. The worst thing that we can tell you at a place like Princeton is that you can have it all." He scanned the small group around him and brushed the leathery buttons holding his vest tightly over his large body. "Well," he said. "You can't.

I'm just surprised because most of the fantasy worlds in movies and books are lily white. -Well, that's just crazy!

Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction.

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

Possibly I was mistaken, but it seemed to me that he went pale. At last he muttered, "It isn't much of a ghost story, I'm afraid, but then I didn't make it up.

An Irishman's heart is nothing but his imagination.

I'm determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.

I wonder how girls manage to fall in love. It is easy to make them do it in books. But men are too ridiculous. Gwendolen Harleth

Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!–then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet they were hardly what she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own, but no dream-world would satisfy her now.

Who says that fictions only and false hair Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty? Is all good structure in a winding stair?

Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.

Also, most people read fiction as an escape - and I wonder whether my books aren't a bit too grounded in reality to reach the widest possible audience.

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

I think 'Scarface' is a great film, but if you have a character like Tony Montana, you don't identify with him at all. I think it's very interesting instead to identify yourself with a character you don't like all the time. You can create a tension between the fiction and the viewer. You force the spectator to wonder about his actions.