Quotes About Fiction

La ficción es una mentira que encubre una profunda verdad; ella es la vida que no fue, la que los hombres y mujeres de una época dada quisieron tener y no tuvieron y por eso debieron inventarla. p. 13. Cartas a un joven novelista.

Screen fictions are intense in their immediacy and ephemeral in terms of their effects: they seize us and then release us almost immediately; with literary fictions, we are prisoners for life.

Mi país, nuestros países, son, en un sentido profundo, más ficciones que realidades.

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today

But they are different because the pictures in my head are all pictures of things which really happened. But other people have pictures in their heads of things which aren't real and didn't happen.

Sólo oprime este botón y puedes aumentar veinte veces el peso de un objeto. Ponlo en reversa y lo puedes hacer flotar. -¿En serio? -¿Estás loco? Es un bate de baseball envuelto en papel brillante, amigo. ¿Cómo podría alguien construir un bastón de gravedad?

Writing a novel creates a window to a new way of looking at the world. Reading one means looking through that window.

I think a good novel makes the reader think not just about what happened, but about what is possible

Why do I love writing? I can be who I want, do what I want, hurt who I want, and make the world over, just the way I'd love to have it.

There is no fiction. There's only truth disguised as fiction

As does a magician, a writer creates a world, immerses the reader in it, & makes the reader believe it's reality.

Theism produces sloppy ways of thinking because it doesn't necessarily respect reason but instead favors fiction.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. - from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- A Clockwork Orange Resucked intro to first full American version 1986

As for the new world war that's waiting in the womb of time, a healthily developed foetus, who can say what will spark it, how destructive it will be? We've already played at this war in film and fiction, indicating that there's a part of us that desperately wants it. What nonsense writers and filmmakers talk when they say that their terrible visions are meant as a warning. [...] It's sheer wish fulfillment. War... is a culture pattern. It's a legitimate mode of cultural transmission....

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory.

When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory.

People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical.

Who would ever think of learning to live out of an English novel?

On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man's power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.

These leave-takings in novels are as disagreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory.