Quotes About Fiction

the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop.

Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn't it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain – they absolutely weren't going to sparkle in the sunlight.

She was spontaneously created by the midichlorians,' I said. Both women gave me blank looks. 'Never mind.

Under the vaulted arch of its white iron-and-glass roof it was as if IKEA had been hired to refit St. Pancras station. If Thomas the Tank Engine had been Swedish, his living room would have looked just the same.

While the tales were most like only tales, none could doubt the truth of the riddle.

In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you'd forgotten was there. Frame, crossbeams, slats, braces, joins. Revealing the softer sapwood, which is marked by candle burns. ...Jonathan holding both of my hands under the table, one of the first times we'd really touched. You must think I'm a lunatic. No, I think it's a beautiful story. About family and art and memory and meaning, how it's made and unmade.

Because you believe, even though you'll deny it, that writing has some kind of magical power. And you're probably crazy enough to make your fiction come true somehow.

I'd become the unreliable narrator of my first novel.

This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.

The greatest writers of spy fiction have, in almost every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing. W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré: all had experienced the world of espionage firsthand. For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.

In the film, Montagu makes a cameo appearance as an air vice marshal with doubts about the plan's feasibility. At one point in the film, Montagu leans over to Webb, looks him in the eye, and declares: "I suppose you realise, Montagu, that, if the Germans see through this, it will pinpoint Sicily." This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.

Everyone had a story he believed was worthy of a best-seller; for me, reality was rarely interesting enough to take the place of fiction.

It's impressive when you're such a mysterious fictional character that even avid enthusiasts are debating your existence within the mythos.

We live in a Jesus haunted culture that is Biblically illiterate, and so unfortunately at this point in time, almost anything can pass for knowledge of the historical Jesus from notions that he was a a Cynic sage to ideas that he was a Gnostic guru to fantasies that he didn't exist, to Dan Browne's Jesus of hysterical (rather than historical) fiction.

I believe that nothing in newspapers is ever true," said Madame Phoebus. "And that is why they are so popular," added Euphrosyne; "the tast of the age being so decidedly for fiction.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.

Realism is the trend.

They're always wrong in the movies.

I like to write about things that don't reflect exactly on my life.

One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.

Not to sound too Pollyanna-ish, but I think most people are decent, caring human beings. You don't necessarily see that reflected in fiction maybe, because possibly it's perceived as not having much dramatic potential.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.