Quotes About Fiction

In fiction that has a higher aim, the credibility of every important action in the story is at risk unless the writer is confident that the motivation or ability of the character makes the action credible.

Wilder taught me that what a writer deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence. It is our job, in nonfiction as well as fiction, to juxtapose words that reveal what previously may have been blinked, and provide insights obscured by convention and shame.

All of these early exposures to offstage happenings contribute to the belief that stories are told. They can be a liability to writers later in life because the writer has to change his mind-set from telling what happened somewhere else to creating an experience for the reader by showing what happened. Twentieth

Modern history has become little more than propaganda, a highly developed kind of fiction which entered the world scene with another form of fiction known as "scientific truth." Neither is concerned with substantial reality, but only with what is useful or politically correct at the moment.

Poets tell many lies.

Poirot smoothed his mustache, as if he imagined that laughing might have shaken it out of shape.

Would you mind dreadfully if I put you in a book one day?

If you ask for a memory and they tell you a story, they're lying

Soul mates' are fiction and an illusion; and while every young man and young woman will seek with all diligence and prayerfulness to find a mate with whom life can be most compatible and beautiful, yet it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price.

It used to be that the longest unprotected border in the world was that between the United States and Canada. Today it's the one between fact and fiction. If the two cozy up any closer together The National Enquirer will be out of business.

The cubs looked into Mama's eyes, then at each other, and then they began to tell one of the biggest whoppers that has ever been told in Bear Country.  

However things took an unexpected turn when, out of the blue, the host of the radio show asked me who I would consider to be the best dog fiction writer ever. I don't think I have ever been asked that question before, nor can I remember thinking about it seriously, however I knew what my answer would be immediately—Albert Payson Terhune. – Stanley Coren, 'The Best Dog Fiction Writer Ever? – Psychology Today online article.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later?" Stanley Kubrick

When you got a giant killer robot, who needs metaphors?

Invento i libri e racconto di averli letti. Fingo così bene e li rigiro nel cervello così a lungo che forse a quel punto potrei anche scriverli. Ma fantasticare è piacevole, scrivere è faticoso.

A certain style of modern detective fiction might show our hero rushing to a terribly clever supposition by page sixteen and spending the rest of the novel proving himself right, but for your long-suffering actual policeman there is merely painstaking elimination and solid detective work, which means questioning every possible suspect.

She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people.

though it was too true that life as she is lived has a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.

Girls, we're fiction editors--we know how to plot, and we know how to cover our tracks. We can teach Jerry Key a lesson he'll never forget.

Contrary to popular opinion, 'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary.

Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.