Quotes About Fiction

I'd ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that's where they belong. Go on, take them: let

But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.

Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.

This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn't just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids' story?

In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.

No intento tejer una historia; estoy tratando de contar la verdad.

This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn't just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?

When asked What The Novel Does, I tend to answer, 'It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?

religions were the first great inventions of the fiction writers. A convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds. A beautiful, shapely story containing hard, exact lies.

Oh, God. She'd now have to invent a bawdy verse on the spot. She'd never had to improvise so much in her entire life as she had in the last five minutes. Improvise being another word for lie, of course.

The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

But in a song or a tale, anything is possible

Even the most made up of stories has its roots in the truth. That one more so than many.

To write and not tell the truth? That would be death for any writer. But more, it would be death to the imagination. And if the imagination dies, what would happen to the souls of children?

Yaban KuÄŸular? - Çin'de Üç K?zkardeÅŸ

Manche von uns haben Lieblingsbücher, die sie nie gelesen haben. Manche sogar welche, die nie geschrieben wurden. Dieses hier ist eines von meinen, und deshalb schreibe ich es auf.

She had no children, or perhaps she had eaten them when they were young.

you can't have a logical discussion with someone who makes up their own facts.

Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.

As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn't really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.

Personally, I don't think it right to make up things about real people—although I suppose there's an argument for saying that once you're dead you're not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first-class honours, or both).

Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.