Quotes About Fiction

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

Mindketten izgalmat kerestek a könyvekben, ahogyan a legjobb olvasók mindig is teszik; és mindketten kérkedést, unalmat és hitvány hazugságokat találtak oly sok híres m?ben.

To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist.

repeat however for the benefit of those who like books to provide them with "real people" and "real crime" and a "message" (that horror of horrors borrowed from the jargon of quack reformers) that Dead Souls will get them nowhere.

Actually the question of mortal precedence has now hardly any importance. I mean, the hero and heroine should get so close to each other by the time the horror begins, so organically close, that they overlap, intergrade, interache, and even if Vaniada's end is described in the epilogue we, writers and readers, should be unable to make out (myopic, myopic) who exactly survives, Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda.

Para mí, una obra de ficción sólo existe en la medida en que me proporciona lo que llamaré, lisa y llanamente, placer estético, es decir, la sensación de que es algo, en algún lugar, relacionado con otros estados de ánimo en que el arte (curiosidad, ternura, bondad, éxtasis) es la norma.

non di rado la vita imita i romanzieri francesi.

Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me;

For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art is the norm.

The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales... literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

We shall do our best to avoid the factual error of looking for so-called real life in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fictions of facts with the facts of fiction. ... A master piece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

We shall do our best to avoid the factual error of looking for so-called real life in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. ... A master piece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

The most effective young Facebook users, however -- the ones who will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults -- are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

She turned to him, her cheeks burning red. "What is this? Vampire porn?" "Yep." "Oh, and this is a good one. Muffy the Vampire Layer.

What I love most about being a writer is the opportunity to "play Goddess" by creating happy endings for people I care about (my characters) and being able to work in my robe!

Lately she'd been listening to books on tapes, fat womanly novels as she thought of them. Maeve Binchy, Gail Godwin, Marian Keyes. Pat Conroy—

Talking about the characters in a book she had enjoyed felt like gossiping about friends.

I'm simply advising you to remain true to your characters. Nothing can happen now that hasn't been prepared for. As writers, we must stay within the reality we've created.