Quotes About Fiction

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

But in a story, which is a type of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experiences. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.

The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable--who we are, why we are--and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.

That's a true story that never happened.

Imagination was a killer.

Just because it never happened doesn't mean it isn't true.

If a story seems moral, do not believe it.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Mi always thought of him as living in a body one size smaller than his being - part of him always rushing forward beyond the rest of him, leaving part of him behind. [...] Skin-tight, expressionless - and your self made up of dreams and stories - Boy Carlton - Boy Balfour - Boy Hannay. I know all your heroes, my dear one - I gave you the books in which you found them.

Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. And usually tries to leave a better aftertaste.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

Rules such as Write what you know, and Show, don't tell, while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing class is, 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write anything you can imagine.

One of his students was an intense young man who was interested in writing fiction. My father lent him some books and talked to him for hours about the art of the novel. The boy went on to write a novel himself, a colorful fantasy about New Orleans, but no one wanted to publish it. He later killed himself. His name was John Kennedy Toole

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end.

I thought of muses as inventions to protect one's insight, to avoid questions like Where do your ideas come from? Or to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction.

Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.

I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness self off and away from the reach of the writer's imagination.

It was a funny thing: once you tell your story to others it becomes more like fiction and less like truth. A layer of performance is added to it, removing you further from the real thing.