Quotes About Fiction

There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction. What does that tell you about the nature of life, and does one really want to know?

Ce que l'imaginaire fabrique devient réel

I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone. Your fiction is with you.

But alone with my prose I am maker and critic, teacher and student, lazy and specific. Alone with my prose I fail for days and sometimes years and over the course of many drafts. Incapable of finding the truth in memoir, I turn to fiction. Paralyzed by length, I turn to poems. Bucking against short lines I turn to prose again, to truth again, to nonsequential truth because that seems more truthful.

I thought he was the man I'd been waiting for. A hero right out of Austen. The one who would finally make everything okay. Only he wasn't real. Like Austen's characters, he was fiction. Mr. Darcy broke my heart.

I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'

FIB, n. A lie that has not cut its teeth.

Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies

The things that happen in fiction mirror those things that have happened ---or will happen soon --- in real life.

When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It's like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now when was then?

Fantasy island before

Yes, and our kid brother Superhero has died so many times that the readers barely even notice anymore.

Our fictions move us to do great things, things worth doing for no better reason than there's poetry in us. We dream before we do.

Is that a True Story, Papa said. Well I won't say it's a Fact Story, Calley said, but Yes Sir I will say it is for god dam sure a True Story.

I am careful about fiction. A novel is not a tract or an essay. If I want to write about land reforms, or Hindu-Muslim relations, or position of women, I can do it as it affects my characters as in 'A Suitable Boy.' I could only write about issues specifically through essays. But I'll do that only if I have something worthwhile to say.

I have a background writing screenplays and teleplays. I've tried to write prose and fiction but never really completed anything I thought worthy of publication or worthy of anyone else to even look at.

When we were filming, I thought that I was Peter Pan, you know? I thought I was the coolest kid in the world, so I wound up being the coolest kid in the world.

I don't read a ton of fiction, but Tom Wolfe's death got me to pick up 'The Bonfire of the Vanities.' I'm a slow reader, but wow - I ended up devouring it in about six days. I'm fascinated with that period, the '80s, when the country was turning around but it seemed like New York and other cities were just hopelessly lost.

It's always hard to wrap up a series. The longer I spend with the characters, the more they become like friends.

Sometimes I can tackle an issue -homelessness, tobacco litigation, insurance fraud, the death penalty - and wrap a good story around it. These are the best books, the ones with a story and a message.

Even to this day, when I think about the fact that I'm in this 'Star Wars' world, that I'm a half-brother to Darth Vader and an uncle to Luke Skywalker, it's too hard to wrap my head around.

Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.

Faulkner is a really important figure in southern literature. I wrestle with him and his legacy every time I sit down and write a piece of fiction.

It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.