Quotes About Fiction

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

They've also asked me now to start on another series that we're gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it's not science fiction, it's more in the Mystery and Crime division and that's another area I'm very interested in.

After all, our experience tends to confirm that on one end of the political spectrum we have autocrats and tyrants—horrible, selfish thugs who occasionally stray into psychopathology. On the other end, we have democrats—elected representatives, presidents, and prime ministers who are the benevolent guardians of freedom. Leaders from these two worlds, we assure ourselves, must be worlds apart! It's a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.

We're writers, the people hired for their imaginations.

what distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it.

The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal , they are not untrue ...

Everyone knows that what they see in the movies is not real, but they're still able to let themselves go for two hours and "believe" what they see up on the screen.

Books about business deal with functions and strategies—the mechanics of running a successful company," he said. "Fiction teaches you about human beings—how they think, how they behave, what's important to them. I'm more interested in people than I am in how businesses work.

Well, normality, you know, is a fiction in psychiatry. It's all relative. No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.

The imagination is always more horrible than the truth.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems. Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural encounter in fiction seems to reflect some deeper disorientations in the culture at large.

There is a weakness in the people after the war. They are open to slogans. The boundaries between fact and fiction have become so dissolved it's hard to tell the difference. As if people have now developed an appetite for dishonesty. The lies they like to hear. Rogue words to match their resentment. They want the blame for their losses to be placed on the vulnerable, the unwelcome, those from elsewhere.

The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.

I was tempted to start babbling crazily about Walter Cronkite: that he was heavy into the white slavery trade—sending agents to South Vietnam to adopt orphan girls, then shipping them back to his farm in Quebec to be lobotomized and sold into brothels up and down the Eastern seaboard….

It was a war scripted by Heller from a story by Orwell, and somebody would be bombing their own airfield before too long, no doubt.

And a more foolish notion can scarcely be imagined, it being obvious that the reader is only informed of what the writer wishes him to know, and is thus seduced into believing almost anything.

It reads better than it lives .

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

Only in fairy tales are unwanted babies orphaned upwards.

It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else.