Quotes About Fiction

These books are so splendid, they frustrate readers conditioned to lesser historical fiction in which every Confederate officer was young, dashing, and raised with a free-black best friend on a progressive plantation, or that features a feisty, clandestinely educated, proto-liberated woman rebelling valiantly against the constricting patriarchal societies of bygone centuries (all the while wearing enthralling dresses). The first sort of novel romanticizes the past, the second euthanizes it. The

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

Readers don't want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions. . . . Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face down unimaginable terrors, to solve impossible puzzles, to feel a lightning jolt of adrenaline.

Myth is not about whether something is fact or fiction; myth is more about truth. Good myth, according to the old adage, is about something that continues to be true again and again, over time.

seldom traveled. Not really. Travel was too damn unpredictable. Instead, they contrived daydreams. They chose template fictions that matched, or came close enough to, the vacation they wanted to describe to their friends back home.

Fiction is overrated, Fly. We've discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that's what counts.

Then let's treat all these holy texts as stories, fictions, and imperfections that could excite us to tears or erections.

Ay la ficción que daño hace, y Sebastián debería haberlo sabido, viniendo de un país cuyo héroe más grande lleva un orinal en la cabeza. No leas tanto, le decían de niño, y no hizo caso, y así le ha ido. La ficción puede muy bien instalarse en el alma de un hombre hasta destruirla. Sebastián había visto y admirado a lo largo de su vida, hombres capaces de hacer cosas en el mundo real e incapacitados para la ficción.

I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.

You're smiling. But you must know yourself, since you are a literary person, that the work of fiction is always a form of recovery of the past, even if that past has to be falsified to seem real. The act of recalling the past in what we write doesn't mean knowing the way it really was, but rather becoming the master of memories as they burn in the perilous instant of creation.

And so, for me, the only fiction that still means something today is the kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it; the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's intelligence and imagination rather than man's distorted view of reality; the kind of fiction that reveals man's playful irrationality rather than his righteous rationality.

Plots are for dead people.

The soul began as unquestionably real and the self ended as arguably a fiction.

True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love.

I've read Flowers in the Attic and The Other Side of Midnight and Go Ask Alice and I don't want to read any more books where the girl dies in the end.

What I found so captivating about the idea of being a writer was having the ability to write down all these things I made up in my head so other people could see them.

I'm not saying I talk to cartoon characters all the time, but the characters are very real to me. In a very non-insane way.

I think people like to have their categories clear. They want to know if it's fiction or fact, biopic or not.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.

There were no small brown kids as the centre of the children's fiction I grew up with.

If you're going to establish a certain level of unreality than you have to deal with it.

I kind of watch anything on the Syfy channel.