Quotes About Fiction

She'd rather have nightmares about Randall Flagg or Carrie or Jack Torrance than about her own past.

Because books bring us to another time and place," the

That's what books were for, after all. They were passageways to other worlds, other realities, other lives one could imagine living.

Let them believe that the fairy tales were the fiction, and that everything else was real.

Women's fiction is just a marketing category, designed to appeal more to women than to men. But there are stories in that category that any human being would like.

He rolled his eyes. "Fiction lies for the truth.

Fiction is very, very important," he said, his voice is rising. "Storytelling is how people learn. You get people to understand new cultures and other lives through stories. Made-up stories. Fiction.

The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press…did not foresee…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal….In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." —ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

Anyhow, my point is that you know now that nonfiction is never the entire truth, and fiction is almost never pure fabrication.

If you're fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction

We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.

Then I read The Once and Future King, and for most of a year I was young Arthur, Dad was Merlyn, and it was my destiny to create the perfect kingdom of Camelot somewhere beyond northeastern Illinois.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Their conversations usually followed the same pattern: beginning with Lady Franklin and her obsession, they ended with Leadbitter and his fictitious home-life. Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies; but Lady Franklin asked a great many questions and Leadbitter told her a great many lies.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

Fantasy is often better than reality. It's much more inspiring not to go to places than to go.

Race, it turns out, is above all a politically useful fiction.

If this were a book or movie, she thought, she'd be able to read the stars and get her bearings. Characters always had just the right random skill set to master the situation at hand. Like, Thank god for that summer on an uncle's smuggling boat and the handsome deckhand who taught me celestial navigation. Ha.

An alien landing would unify the world, just like in a science fiction movie. But "angels" had the potential to splinter humanity into a thousand sharp shards.

Livet är verkligen inte en saga, och ibland får man synnerligen skoningslösa bevis för hur osagolikt det kan vara (s. 317).

Who sneers? wondered Eliza, fadingly. She'd thought it was something only book characters did.

But all stories are made up," I offered. "All telling is retelling, and therefore it is fiction. Everybody knows that.

There is truth in stories," said Arthur. "There is truth in one of your paintings, boy or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not a fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.

I can't believe he didn't have the dignity and presence of mind just to get drunk and pass out in some gutter," said Jace. "I must say, I'm disappointed in the little fellow.