Quotes About Fiction

I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction.

Tell me a tale in which a woman is wed, and she is happy." The boy's lip trembled, and there was pity in him like a stranging vine. He knelt at Dinarzad's bare feet, and held her hands in his. "I do not know any stories like that", he whispered.

But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books.

I never promised I would write the truth. I

He is everything, everything, everything I ever admired and wanted and couldn't have. He is everything I needed and couldn't find in real life. Of course he is. That's why I invented him.

Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

The story she had told me was possible, but it was not believable.

Nel paese della bugia, la verità è una malattia.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

A good novel tells you the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells you the truth about its author.

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

Un lecteur est un être qui manque d'imagination, car autrement il s'écrirait lui-même ses propres fictions.

La realtà può permettersi ogni stranezza: la fantasia no.

It's just what you're stuck with, the lousy furniture you can't change. The educated me knows hell's nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I'm going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way." "It's the postmodern solution," I said. "Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself.

Many of the characters named in this book existed, as did the shadowy order sometimes known as the Brotherhood of St. John of Tobolsk.

The rest, but a small part, is fiction, part of the mosaic of storytelling that a writer must employ to bring life to his tale. But as to which part is truth and which small part is fiction, I will leave that for you to decide.

I soon developed myopia and a firm belief that people in books were not only more interesting but more real than people outside of books.

Exaggeration is to paint a snake and add legs.

If I adhere to any fundamental principle in my writing, perhaps it is my belief that the function of fiction is essentially to amuse or entertain the reader. The mark of good writing, in my opinion, is that the reader is not aware that the story has been written; as he reads, the ideas and images flow into his mind as if he were living them. The utmost accolade a writer can receive is that the reader is incognizant of his presence.

Vampire in real life aren't like the ones in the movies. They weren't going to be playing baseball in a thunderstorm.

Jacqueline Wilson

explained: "It happened, but only in the mind of the writer. And, of course, in your mind, too. That's what a novel is. The exchange of dreams.

because intelligent persons do not attempt to keep abreast with modern fiction. It is probably ascribable to the fact that they enjoy being intelligent, and wish to remain so.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.