Quotes About Fiction

Ray Bradbury

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation.The only legitimate of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous--so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction.

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

The problem is that Sontag wasn't sufficiently interested in real-life details, the lifeblood of fiction, but only in ideas. She also wrote and directed films, which were not well reviewed: I have not seen these myself, but there is time enough to do so, for I have long assumed that they are playing as a permanent double feature in the only movie theater in hell.

conference? She was the Princess Repanse de Schoye of von Eschenbach's Grail Romance, the "lady of the mountain of Tabor."27 Von Eschenbach's "fiction", in other words, was no fiction at all, it was a hidden history of the Cathars, the Grail, and the "Grail Crusade.

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.

Fairy stories had introduced him to morality and he came to believe that only in morality was reality.

If every vampire who said he was at The Crucifixion, was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock . . .

I myself have never enjoyed anything more than writing. I love to live in that world.

Sometimes you might make up a story and tell it to other people

An untrue story that is told for fun is called a fantasy.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.

Imagine que en el mismo espacio que ocupa usted con su cuerpo verdadero, existe otro cuerpo, el cuerpo imaginario de su personaje, que usted ha creado en su mente. MICHAEL CHEKHOV

It had well be a dream, no one would believe me anyway.

How like science fiction our lives are, she thinks. The alternate universe in which, innocently, ignorantly, we continue to exist as we'd been, unaware that, in another universe, we'd have ceased to be.

En lo más íntimo, Pedro Páramo nació de una imagen y fue la búsqueda de un ideal que llamé Susana San Juan. Susana San Juan no existió nunca: fue pensada a partir de una muchachita a la que conocí brevemente cuando yo tenía tres años. Ella nunca lo supo y no hemos vuelto a encontramos en lo que llevo de vida.

Moving both backward and forward in time, re-creating believable dialogue, switching back and forth between scene and summary, and controlling the pace and tension of the story, the memoirist keeps her reader engaged by being an adept storyteller. So, memoir is really a kind of hybrid form with elements of both fiction and essay, in which the author's voice, musing conversationally on a true story, is all important.

you must remain limited by your experience, unless you turn to fiction, in which you can, of course, embrace people, places, and events you have never personally known.

While imagination certainly plays a role in both kinds of writing, the application of it in memoir is circumscribed by the facts, while in fiction it is circumscribed by what the reader will believe.

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie.