Quotes About Fiction

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

No se piensa en nada; las horas pasan. Uno se pasea inmovil por paises que cree ver, y su pensamiento, enlazandose a la ficcion, se recrea en los detalles o sigue el hilo de las aventuras. Se identifica con los personajes; parece que somos nosotros mismos los que participamos bajo sus pieles.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself, but to move in an entire universe of your own creation.

All that people have found fault with as exaggerated in fiction you have made me feel.

No se piensa en nada –continuaba él–, las horas pasan. Uno recorre sin moverse países que cree estar viendo, y el pensamiento, siguiendo a la ficción, se recrea en los detalles o sigue el hilo de las aventuras. Se identifica con los personajes y parece que es uno mismo quien palpita bajo sus ropas.

History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.

It is not unusual for the central menace of a work of horror fiction to be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.

Nella sua dimora a R'lyeh il morto Cthulhu attende sognando

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

R'lyeh'deki evinde ölü Cthulhu düÅŸ görerek bekliyor.

Yet everyone knows that money is fundamentally an invention, a fiction.

The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies and imagines he is telling the truth.

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the Leader, who, like a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality.

all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of "counter-revolutionary" activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts.

newspapers finally brought to its front page what up to then had been buried in the highly non-respectable literature of science fiction (to which, unfortunately, nobody yet has paid the attention it deserves as a vehicle of mass sentiments and mass desires).

They are designed to translate the propaganda lies of the movement, woven around a central fiction—the conspiracy of the Jews, or the Trotskyites, or 300 families, etc.—into a functioning reality, to build up, even under nontotalitarian circumstances, a society whose members act and react according to the rules of a fictitious world.

the Stalin regime was ruthlessly consistent: all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of "counter-revolutionary" activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts.

Writers are completely out of touch with reality.

There's never a case of, 'Ooh, I touched a nerve there.' It's make believe.

I think noir is an immensely powerful - and elastic - lens through which to look at narrative and character. It seems to access something dark and true in us that other modes of fiction are often a bit prissy about touching. But the key to making it work as time and culture moves on is to use the elasticity, not just the power.