Quotes About Fiction

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

I sighed rapturously. It was a wonderful story, and might well be true. Even it if wasn't true, it was the sort of thing that should happen

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

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification.

Poets have a license to lie.

Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact, but a legal fiction.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even better.

Such, Polly, are your sex - part truth, part fiction; Some thought, much whim, and all contradiction.

The truth is, we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult, the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.

It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

You can't just pick up a gun and become a gunfighter, or go off and explore for a new world, or pull a sword out of a stone, or rescue a damsel in distress, or-- so we play games and we read books because the world isn't the world we thought we were supposed to get, the world we thought we'd been promised by somebody. Because things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to. So we go someplace else.

All the stories we tell ourselves are wrong.

You can't make this shit up.

No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice).

Resulta extraño añorar lo jamás tenido, aquello de lo que nunca ha formado parte. Resulta extraño tener una sensación elíaca acerca de un pasado que en realidad nunca ha conocido

Entonces quiero hablar filosofía ahora! ¿Qué pasa si no me despierto? ¿Por qué no está permitido que venga aquí don Quijote? –Don Quijote puede cruzar los mares y venir, pero tiene que hacerlo en un libro, como el que lo trajo cuando llegó hasta ti. No puede aparecerse en carne y hueso. En cuanto a no despertarse, si no nos despertamos nunca, entonces… nada, nada, nada. Eso es lo que quiero decir con filosofía.

Maar ik moet zeggen dat ik mijn geduld verlies met fictie die iets probeert wat nog niet eerder is geprobeerd, liefst het met medium zelf.

He who writes books that aim to convince is a comedian, too, just a comedian. What has he got to offer others, apart from chains, still more chains? Fiction never liberated anyone. No one ever brought anything back from voyages through dream worlds.

Well, too bad, boys—life wasn't an epi of Doctor Who. And you know what?

Murhder. My name is Murhder." She laughed. And then her mouth fell open before she could catch herself. "Wait, you're serious." When he nodded, she tried to compose herself. "Oh. Wow. Is—um, is that first or last?" "Last. My first name is Cold-Blooded." As she did a double take, he smiled shyly. "I'm joking. It's just Murhder.