Quotes About Fiction

A little attention however to the nature of the human mind evinces that the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant. That they are pleasant when well written, every person feels who reads. But wherein is its utility, asks the reverend sage, big with the notion that nothing can be useful but the learned lumber of Greek and Roman reading with which his head is stored? I answer, every thing is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue.

Zoyd was out of smokes.

That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.

The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.

once described fiction as a monumental lie that has to have the absolute ring of truth if it is to succeed. And that ring of truth invariably comes from research, which in turn gives a novel its authenticity. It is this kind of authenticity plus good storytelling that made Forever Amber a bestseller 56 years ago. Now

The irony was not lost on any of us that despite the theme there was a robot on the throne.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

But they get some comfort out of the made up stories. And if that helps them get along maybe I should not poke fun.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened

All people live in a fantasy in which they are the main character.

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

It's only a story.' As if such words made it less real. But I did not believe him even then, for stories were written down, and the words on the page were proof enough. Fixed and permanent in time, the words, if anything, made the people and places more real than the everchanging world.

Memory is fiction

the reading of fiction facilitated the development of social skills because it provides the reader with the experience of thinking about other people.

Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet. But she will be, soon. She's a character on a television show called The Library. You've never seen the Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.

Real life is never so neat as the stories we choose to tell about it

To hell with facts! We need stories!

I write thrillers for the same reason that people read them – it's escapism.

Virginia Woolf described in her fiction her chracters' pain in childhood way and linked it to their emotional lives as adults in a way that was ahead of its time. "It's a fallacy to think that children are unhappy... I've never suffered so much as I did when I was a child," says Richard Dalloway M.P., in The Voyage Out.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

Some books are lies frae end to end.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary -- it's always imaginary -- world in which I would like to live.

Sometimes the truth is so bizarre and mind bending that it must be presented as fiction to be accepted. George Saunders The Bookseller

Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul. Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want.