Quotes About Fiction

I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.

I find the middle classes kind of boring. The middle class has kind of been beaten like a dead horse by fictional writers. It's old news, and literature is supposed to bring new news, and for me, I feel I have to go as far out as I can to try and tell the kind of stories I want to tell.

Mike Mignola's 'Hellboy' comics have a drizzly, musty gothic ambience - the same fetid air that H. P. Lovecraft circulated in his fiction.

I would love to work with Shilpa again. But it would have to be for 'Dill Mill Gayye (DMG)' - that's the only fiction show I'll take up on small screen. I'm extremely faithful to that show. That apart, I'm not likely to do anymore fiction on TV for the time being.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.

I did some research on cryonics and cryogenics, but I kept it to a minimum because I didn't want the science part of the novel to overshadow the fiction. Being medically accurate wasn't my main goal.

What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell the truth and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth.

we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.

A novel is a made-up work about made-up people in a made-up place, all of which is very real.

Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.

Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it's over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.

Literature has its own logic; it is not life. Not only that, but (and this is key): characters are not people... and we forget that at our peril.

And there is escaping things the knowledge of which makes one unhappy. If truth is what we know and are aware of, in the most engrossing fiction we escape truth. Whatever else it is, drama is forgetfulness. We can forget and forget that we are forgetting. It is temporary mind control. If memories are pain, fiction is anesthesia.

I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story, or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some are poetical figments; some seem possible and others not; some are for the enjoyment of idiots.

A novel is an impression, not an argument.

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.

A novel which does moral injury to a dozen imbeciles, and has bracing results upon a thousand intellects of normal vigor, can justify its existence; and probably a novel was never written by the purest-minded author for which there could not be found some moral invalid or other whom it was capable of harming. The Profitable Reading of Fiction 1888

The best fiction is truer than history

In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd" as they appeared month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt the word "Wessex" from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in that extinct kingdom.

The regular resource of people who don't go enough into the world to live a novel is to write one. –

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.

Thomas Harris