Quotes About Fiction

Walking the plank is a Victorian fiction, and I will not have it on my ship!

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

George R.R. Martin

I was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. I grew up in the projects. I never went anywhere. But I have lived a thousand lives and I've loved a thousand loves. I've walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.

Before he had lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into another world.

No one will be alive by the last book. In fact, they all die in the fifth. The sixth book will be just a thousand-page description of snow blowing across the graves ...

I am not going to get into it myself, except to say (1) if I am writing "boy fiction," who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings? and (2) thank you, geek girls! I love you all.

Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

It was like murdering two of your children. I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

You should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care.

A reader lives a thousand lives.

Might have punctured a lung, if he had a lung. Most trees don't, as a rule.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

Yet, if he would not lie, what could he write but truth?

All the stories can't be lies.

We all live our lives, but a reader lives a hundred other lives.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. (La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie.)

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.

STAR TREK is a show that had a vision about a future that was positive.