Quotes About Fiction

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur.

I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all—not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

I have to conclude that fiction is better at "the truth" than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don't begin to understand. DORIS LESSING

Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself.

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209)

Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true.

The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies into meaning.?

Asking "what if" and answering that question is the bedrock of what the novel can achieve. The story becomes something more than one person's perspective—it reaches as far as the novelist can imagine.

take details from "real life" into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense.

I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction "from the woman's point of view." To such demands, one can only say "Go away and don't be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.

A novelist couldn't possibly marry all the people from whom she wanted specialised information.

Hitherto, said Lord Peter, as they picked their painful way through the little wood on the trail of Gent's No. 10's, I have always maintained that those obliging criminals who strew their tracks with little articles of personal adornment--here he is, on a squashed fungus--were an invention of detective fiction for the benefit of the author. I see that I have still something to learn about my job.

Detective-story writers are obliged by their disagreeable profession to invent startling and unpleasant incidents and people, and are (I presume) at liberty to imagine what might happen if such incidents and people were to intrude upon the life of an innocent and well-ordered community;

How can I tell, said the man, that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

What is this? Some sort of galactic hyperhearse?

This sentence is not true

How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?" Zarniwoop

Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has traveled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I think so.

He had repaired his ship – that is, he'd watched with alert interest whilst a service robot had repaired it for him. It

no correspondence is intended between any institutions or characters in this book and any real institutions or people living, dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment.