Quotes About Fiction

We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. The idea that they have authority is ludicrous. They are very good at imagining character: that's why the novels sell. They have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources. Full stop.

I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.

Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.

A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.

When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction - like space travel - the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.

Most of my work is science fiction, with many a spaceship but few cars.

I have only met men like you in novels, men who lived their own idiosyncrasies.

I have loved many men, but only one in real life. All of the other men who have ever stolen my heart in more than friendship, are in books.

Everything made sense in a book...Too bad her life wasn't fiction.

I love fictional characters...they can't break your heart.

The writings are built by imagination. Emotions fill the colours to them.

The love I knew was from books..

Come to me! Let me take you to a real world of fictions!

Tonight, can we just pretend that you want me too?

I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.

With novelists, names and dates are wrong, the rest is true. With historians, names and dates are correct, the rest is false.

Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of "national identity," which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. ("National traits" might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity—yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously believe in an English "national temperament.")

Winnie did not believe in fairy tales. She had never longed for a magic wand, did not expect to marry a prince, and was scornful—most of the time—of her grandmother's elves. So now she sat, mouth open, wide-eyed, not knowing what to make of this extraordinary story. It couldn't—not a bit of it—be true. And yet:

Nonsense. It's elves!

Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?

This is a work of fiction, and the people in it are fictitious. The ghosts are real.

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.