Quotes About Fiction

The aim of the novelist is not only to hold up a mirror to the world, but to imagine what's possible.

Everything is the proper stuff of fiction. —VIRGINIA WOOLF

I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.

It's not meant to be a factual story, but it's still true.

It's not meant to be a factual story, but it's still true.

What really pissed me off about what you wrote, Karen tried to tell Sarah as Sarah knelt screaming by Martin, as if Sarah had just one stage direction but was going to do it for all she was worth, is how you wrote so much just like it happened, and then left out the actual truth. Why even do that? Who do you think you're protecting?

After reading the Qur'an, I realized that I couldn't possibly endorse Islam as a religion, as a philosophy, as a moral standard, as an ethical code, or even as useful fiction. I determined that these philosophies and this image of Allah could only come from an extremely warped and disturbed person who suffered from an aggregation of the most severe and profound human weaknesses.

When you tell a story, you shape the truth.

Dear God. Brad the Dragon. I swear, if I ever meet that author, I'm going to strangle him with a Brad the Dragon stuffed animal, wrap him in a Brad the Dragon blanket and throw his body out to sea.

She decided she would find out all she could about Bettina then kill off a character just like her in her next book. The death would be grisly, she promised herself. Slow and painful.

His great love, however, was the detective story, which he described as "the one dependable and unfailing anodyne in a world so realistically murderous that fictive murder becomes refuge and retreat.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature. Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated. I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts. I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true.

During the post-breakdown period, she read books the way an addict swallowed pills. She devoured stories one after the other, trying not to let reality intrude too deeply.

Try to be conspicuously accurate in everything, pictures as well as text. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more interesting. -William Randolph Hearst

Opening a book was like opening a door to another world, and once she stepped across the threshold, she was transported. When she was reading a story, she lived inside a different skin. She

she read books the way an addict swallowed pills. She devoured stories one after the other, trying not to let reality intrude too deeply.

What kind of books do you like?" "The kind of books that make me forget my own life for a while.

Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.

Of course, as a model for my magician Strange is far from perfect --he lacks the true heroic nature; for that I shall be obliged to put in something of myself.

I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk

The best fiction captures the truth of real life.

Were those really going to be the final words of fiction I wrote?