Quotes About Fiction

Assez bizarrement, donc, le meilleur argument en faveur de l'authenticité est le coût absolument inabordable de la fiction. Il semblerait donc que le spectre qui hante Navidson Record et ne cesse de se ruer contre la porte, soit tout simplement la menace récurrente de sa propre réalité.

We all create stories to protect ourselves

A KEY WORD*** Imagined

Certo che sei reale», leggo, «come lo è qualunque pensiero, qualunque storia. Diventa tutto reale quando tu ci sei dentro.»

That's what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.

it becomes a problem when we mistake the stories in our minds for The Truth.

I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can't have one without the other.

Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do--like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.

He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.

Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with [literary fiction].

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist's couch or even the lovers' bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.

If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never will, of course. Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we're all addicted and we can't break the habit now. There's not even anything very twentieth century about it, except the disposition. You just can't kick it, that junk, even if you want to. You can't get the money monkey off your back.

When we wake up in the morning (he thought), it's the first task that lies ahead of us: the separation of the true from the false. We have to dismiss, to erase the mocking kingdoms made by sleep. But at the close of day it was the other way round, and we sought the untrue and the fictitious, sometimes snapping ourselves awake in our hunger for nonsensical connections.

John Updike once argued that although fiction can withstand any amount of egocentricity, it is wholly allergic to narcissism.

Songwriting is a mix of fiction and myth. Things are very romanticised. A song is like a film in that you can say anything you want. So there are parts that are based on truth and there are also parts that just sound good or feel good. It's a mixture of the two. It's all imagery. It's not strictly truth.

If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Félix J. Palma, author of the New York Times bestselling The Map of Time, inspired by H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, concludes his time-travel Victorian trilogy with a mesmerizing new novel, The Map of Chaos

Good-night, Mister Sherlock Holmes.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The first object of a novelist, is to tell a tale. If he has no story to tell, what is he there for? Possibly he has something to say which is worth saying, but he should say it in another form.

It would be a great advantage to a young man if his early training could eradicate the idea that the world has a great deal to offer him. But the usual result of education is to strenghten this delusion; and our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than from fact.

Dear Doctor, If you like you can change every inch of me. I'm just a story.

But it's hard to say where experience ends and imagination begins. The story is by no means a true story. But the feelings in it are.

Sitting between the two professors, I enjoyed their contradictory advice. I sat there smiling, thinking of the first message I received from John Berger. It was a beautiful handwritten letter, from a writer who had been my hero for years: 'Your fiction and nonfiction—they walk you around the world like your two legs.' That settled it for me.