Quotes About Fiction

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more interesting.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing!

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

WHAT ARE YOU, NUTS? THE MAN'S A VAMPIRE! Yeah, but he's a really, REALLY sexy one.

Livia, on the other hand, actively preferred literary characters to real-life acquaintances: Tom Sawyer stayed forever young, Viola always retained her spunk, and Mr. Darcy could never turn out to be a hypocrite who was also disappointing in bed.

If it occurred to Thursey that there was really no relationship between marrying your own true love and having a fortune showered upon you, she didn't bother about that. In a story you might as well have both, it was make-believe anyway. But if I had to choose, she thought. If I had to choose . . . she stared at her ragged dress hanging from its hook, and her ragged mended sandals on the shelf, then put the books away. How would I ever have such a choice, except in a made-up story?

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

Being poor is only romantic in books.

I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.

When you write, everything is possible, even the very opposite of what you are.

On Waugh) As a protective device against the bruising contact of life, he was determined to see events and people as a fction from which he was separate.

It is already apparent that the 'minimalist' view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.

I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can't be wrapped up with a nice little bow

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.

Fiction is not an escape from the world either. Imaginary experience is also experience. O

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.