Quotes About Fiction

Suddenly Star Wars came out while we were on hiatus, and we looked like the old Buck Rogers series, where they had cigarette smoke blowing out the back of the rocket ship.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Daphne Du Maurier and Anya Seton, all of Mary Stewart's early books, along with Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney

There are some stories that you don't tell aloud, that you make up and tell silently to yourself.

The novelist Ian McEwan, who credits fiction with providing the possibility of "imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself," argues that this process is "the basis of all sympathy": "Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.

Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.

An excess of fiction could make reality seem supremely dull with its crappy dialogue and lack of coincidences

And how they could have forgotten him, as though he was just a character in a book, dismissed once the covers closed?

Everyone has secrets. Fiction allows people to see themselves in characters, to discover healing and truth when their 'reputation' or shame won't let them pick up a non-fiction book. They can watch characters struggle, then experience the truth that sets them free.

i eat babies

The best fiction is history

For the Gnostics and for the fiction writer evil is the source of all moral understanding; the function of evil, in the best of conditions, is tension and imbalance, the eventual creation, through suffering and misfortune, of wisdom.

The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted.

fiction fiends.

The problem with Harry was that he didn't just pick one lie and stick with it.

Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting.

Storytelling began as a way for humans to relay information, from where to find food sources to the benefits of familial bonding, because fictional stories were the easiest way to memorize and communicate a complete set of information. We remember information best when it is delivered in the form of a plot, which is called 'semantic memory.' Stories still serve a definitive purpose and the stronger the purpose, the clearer the story. Fire Up Your Writing Brain

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

This is a book. Only make-believe. Remember?

It is only in fiction that the protagonist moves in a single minded, one point focus, screening out everything that isn't related to the plot. Real people have to deal with the Myrtles of this world, who have sciatica and cold sores and want to tell you about them

How do you know I'm a writer?" I asked. "I can tell," he said. "You're making shit up in your head all the time.

Essentially I am a history geek trapped somewhere between the creative arts and academic scholarship. The natural result of this is to become an author of historical fiction.

Fiction, also--if done well--can perhaps allow the reader a greater feeling of recognition with people of the past. If we read a novel about people trying to control the Revolution, we're reading about them as people who have desires, ambitions, and neuroses just like ours, and we can relate to them, rather than seeing them just as stiff portraits with funny-looking hair--or as the one-dimensional monsters or saints that many pop histories have made them.