Quotes About Fiction

me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.

Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

People today spend interminable hours telling each other "where they're coming from," and "where they're at," when all that they are doing is inventing implausible little fictions about themselves and their lives. Every new relationship is begun with the dubious exchange of these quirkly little maps.

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly—last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth.

the house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced , or is still pierceable, in its vast front , by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.

Oh, I hoped there would be a lord; it's just like a novel!

I don't believe they're very nice to girls; they're not nice to them in the novels.

El público español ha tendido a preferir la imagen del pasado del país a través de las novelas. En España ha habido una tendencia a promover una actitud en la que la ficción histórica se considera superior a la historia investigada.

There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

I got a call on a Sunday. 'Do you want to do 'The Godfather?' I thought they were kidding me, right? I said, 'Yes, of course, I love that book' - which I had never read.

Sometimes after a compliment about my characterization skills, I'm asked if I model my characters on real people. Emphatically, no. And sort of, yes.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

Yes, Data is hairless but I am not. And we are both anatomically correct.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

New technologies are rapidly giving rise to unprecedented methods of warfare. Innovations that yesterday were science fiction could cause catastrophe tomorrow, including nanotechnologies, combat robots, and laser weapons.

I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

I'm actually from Mt. Kisco, New York, which is in Westchester County, and when I auditioned for 'Dukes,' I told them I was from Snailville, Georgia, which doesn't exist, and I'd just graduated first in my class from the Georgia School of High Performance Driving, which also doesn't exist. But they bought it.

'The New Yorker's fiction podcast I like a lot, where they have authors pick short stories by other authors that appeared in 'The New Yorker.'

When we talk about dystopias, especially in young adult fiction, a lot of them are essentially science fictional futures. They aren't necessarily tied to the traditional concept of dystopia. And so in that space, my impression is that kids love reading about weird, wild, adventurous places, and dystopia fits that bill.

Young adult fiction is getting more popular among adults because the writer is trying hard all the time to maintain the reader's interest.