Quotes About Fiction

The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

A story-book hero had by definition no place in life; he battered his way through twenty victorious chapters, faded out on a lustful kiss, and was gone for good.

And in another light-year or two I was through the word-barrier, and the book had suddenly reached the stage – the wonderful moment to get to – where I could walk right into my imaginary country and see things that I had not consciously created, and listen to people talking and watch them moving, all apparently independent of me.

I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification. -Imagination & Community Essay

Actually, the first time I saw one in real life, I thought of the Great Pit of Carkoon in Return of the Jedi." "OK

It's probably unhealthy to miss a life that never actually existed—to

I had opened a book that could not be closed, started a story that had no obvious conclusion. It was a tale in which I wanted to play no part.

knocking back the wine and reaching for the cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction

No moose, Stevie said. The moose is a lie.

I always wanted stories to be real, so I started writing my own.

This is about real people, not figures from fiction. I know this crime is popular—that crime itself is popular. But crime has a human face. If you're going to study crime, you have to remember the people involved.

Yeah," Nate said. "I guess it would be like that if I could go somewhere in a book. I always wanted stories to be real, so I started writing my own. That seemed to make it more real.

I kind of love it," Nate said, looking around. "It looks like the moisture farm that Luke Skywalker lives on.

I like it," she lied. "You don't understand the Pulsating Norb. No one understands the Pulsating Norb." "I ship it." "Nobody ships the Pulsating Norb," Nate said.

Romanticism demands mastery of the primary element of fiction: the art of storytelling—which requires three cardinal qualities: ingenuity, imagination, a sense of drama.

In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in while I am creating it; then, as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, if, and to the extent that, they can.

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

We do not read in order to turn great works of fiction into simplistic replicas of our own realities, we read for the pure, sensual, and unadulterated pleasure of reading. And if we do so, our reward is the discovery of the many hidden layers within these works that do not merely reflect reality but reveal a spectrum of truths, thus intrinsically going against the grain of totalitarian mindsets.

Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me -- Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to see others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, or imposing our visions and desires on others.

fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289)

Fiction is an antidote, a reminder of the power of individual choice. Every novel has at its core a choice by at least one of its protagonists, reminding the reader that she can choose to be her own person, to go against what her parents or society or the state tell her to do and follow the faint but essential beat of her own heart.

There was something, both in fiction and in his life (Nabokov), that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away. I could invent violin or be devoured by the void.