Quotes About Fiction

Writers need their writing; they need their imaginary worlds in order to find piece in, or make sense of, the real world.

It is said that an eighteenth-century bishop who read Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels threw the book into the fire, indignantly declaring that he didn't believe a word of it. He obviously thought that the story was meant to be true, but suspected that it was invented. Which, of course, is just what it is. The bishop was dismissing the fiction because he thought it was fiction.

I'm not the world's greatest expert, but I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, ... broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?' - when J.K. Rowling insisted she wasn't writing fantasy.

It's going to look pretty good, then, isn't it, said War testily, the One Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocalypse.

Silverfish looked down. Oh. Are you a dwarf? Cuddy gave him a blank stare. Are you a giant? He said. Me? Of course not! Ah. Then I must be a dwarf, yes.

You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?

Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.

No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotter's guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen...

People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.

Under the table, Greebo sat and washed himself. Occasionally he burped. Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but never managed it from the cat.

He had never been interested in stories at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.

And then she woke up and it was all a dream.' It was just about the worst ending you could have to any story.

He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.

And the nice thing about a stake through the heart was that it also worked on non-vampires.

I'm just saying man is naturally a mythopoeic creature. What's that mean? said the Senior Wrangler. Means we make things up as we go along, said the Dean, not looking up.

Humans need fantasy to be human.

And the Nac Mac Feegle are, well, they're like tiny little Scottish Smurfs who have seen Braveheart altogether too many times.

Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought. And because the theater was fiction made flesh, she hated the theater most of all. But that was it—hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.

Look, how about this? Let's pretend we've had the row and I've won. See? It saves a lot of effort.

Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that makes us human.

People don't necessarily like to be experimented on. Not even by fiction.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether

I'm still mad at Josh Charles for dying on 'The Good Wife.'

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.