Quotes About Fiction

Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.

o There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth; it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

to be a fiction writer, you also need to be a psychologist (understanding people's personalities and intentions), a philosopher (asking big questions about meaning and human nature), and a poet (breathing life into your words and the spaces between them).

In real life we want only the best for the people we care about. In fiction, we want things to get the worst for the characters we care about the most, at least on their pathway to the climax.

In real life we avoid crisis events. In fiction we seek them out.

our minds can do strange things, can convince us of things that aren't real. Sometimes we see things that aren't really there, sometimes we don't see things that are. We're all experts at fictionalizing the truth.

THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA(1929) the 'honesty' of documentary as compared with fiction film, the 'perfection' of the cinematic eye compared with human eye.

Un libro es una máquina para fabricar sueños. Está hecho para sacarte de este mundo.

The sound of a feeding was impossible to ignore. Cross heard the smack of teeth, and sucking sounds so loud he swore they came from there in the room. He heard pained moans and animal barks. It amused him to think that once, so very long ago, these creatures had been painted as romantics by fiction writers. They were animals, pure and simple, vicious of heart, evil of spirit, malign in their sole drive to wipe humanity out.

So we'll leave him [Plato] to the philosophers and not try to make a novelist of him against his will; he excluded innovative artists from his ideal republic, so we'll exclude him from our republic of fiction.

Fiction is empathy technology.

The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.

But ignoring something doesn't make it less real, y'know. Something isn't fiction just because you choose not to acknowledge it.

When I die, I'm going to leave my body to science fiction.

I donated my body to science...fiction.

I'm donating my body to science...fiction.

In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That's why we are science fiction writers, not scientists.

Any man worth my love lives only in storybooks.

In moments of reverie; he sometimes wondered whether he himself was but the subject of a lonely pIerson's writing, as Ays and Finnigin were his.

When he felt sexually excited, Casmeer found with some alarm, that he wanted to harm his characters, his self-children. He wanted to squeeze them, to make them bleed. This, he despised in himself, but then considered that as the stories were fictions, it was acceptable for him to exorcise his feelings through them. He did not have to judge himself for his lewd or wicked thoughts.

He was inventing the world beyond, peopling it, making them live.

Do you stop reading a book because you don't want to watch the characters you like turn out to be unlikable, or the ones with which you identify denied the happy ending you believe they deserve?

Just, that we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel . . . consoled, I think he said, by that notion. Consoled to think that life isn't just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence." She smiled at Edith. "I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the meaninglessness of death.