Quotes About Fiction

Learn from your existence and borrow things from your day to day. Have adventures. Take risks. Put yourself into your fiction. Because life offers a kind of writing advice you just can't read about -- it's something only you can experience.

Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.

To a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it; one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value.

All our stores are more or less made up, after all.

An android voice answered, "It's Mr. Thorne, sir, on the mentophone from Andrelon." "Thank you, Alice," Adams said.

Clifford D. Simak

At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.

If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.

And the stories she'd been told, were they confessions of uncommitted crimes, accounts of the worst imaginable, imagined to keep fiction from becoming fact? The thought chased its own tail: these terrible stories still needed a first cause, a well-spring from which they leaped... Were these inventions common currency, as Purcell had claimed? Was there a place, however small, reserved in every heart for the monstrous?

Good horror fiction deals with taboos. It must always go to the limits of what is acceptable.

and what constitutes the making of a true storyteller; someone who speaks directly to the reader's dreams with dreams of their own.

Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation.

We're making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.

Horror fiction tends to be reactionary. It's usually about to return to the status quo -- the monster is the outsider who must be banished from the sanctum. But over and over again, I've created monsters who come from the outside and who call out to somebody to join them in the sanctum.

I think sometimes horror fiction has a significance which we forget, which is if you fear something in fiction, you have the chance of a resolution. You have a chance that the story will finish itself.

I've heard writers defend some pretty appalling stuff by arguing that they have an obligation to depict the world as it is, but fiction has no such obligation. It's not a mirror to reality, it's a prism. It refracts experience. Also, I think some writers are reluctant to admit that part of their aim is to shock the reader, and that's a downward spiral. We have, as consumers, become increasingly inured to violence. Most of us are pretty hard to shock.

If I've learned anything from two decades of fantastique writing it's that the more extraordinary the subject matter the more specific the details need to be.

The demon – what did Harry call him? Dick face? Pinprick? Pinhead! That was it.

Unfortunately we have to remember we're scientists, not writers of popular semifictional archaeological claptrap.

And nobody has ever gotten emotional over a James Patterson novel.

A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.

Memory is three-quarters imagination and all the rest is lies.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.