Quotes About Fiction

Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality.

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.

It was a story filled with the most unhappy, mean characters that I've ever seen.

I have to agree that most people in America read a kind of a fiction which is not of a high literary calibre. People read for entertainment.

If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life.

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it

Science fiction is always about the time it's written in. 1984 was always about 1948. Science fiction is social fiction.

There was a push, in the Sixties and Seventies, to rename science fiction as "speculative fiction" just to try and escape all that baggage. But the truth is that science fiction is like a big old pustule that burst open at the top of the 21st Century, and its muck got into everything. We now live in a world infused with science fiction. Little infections in everything.

Are you Satan? Satan was just a story. I am Karnak.

Science fiction is always about the time it's written in. 1984 was always about 1948. Science fiction is social fiction. I

The most important unacknowledged narrators in modern fiction are the third-person "centers of consciousness" through whom authors have filtered their narratives.

It's experiences in life that give us something to write about, and since good fiction is applied tension, you'll have an arsenal of good material if life hasn't been peachy (and not a whole lot if it has).

He was reminded dully of a scene in The Big Parade years ago (was everything in fiction or in film more real to him than fact?) in which the American troops were shown advancing across a wooded slope into battle: walking slowly doggedly on, their guns in their hands, their grim faces set: plodding straight ahead in a kind of frightful and relentless monotony, undeterred by bursting shrapnel, smoke, gas, tank-fire, or their own dead.… He did not push his way through the crowds.

Who would believe that? Nobody. And wasn't it just as well? Wasn't it even more fun—weren't you liked even more—if they sort of got the teasing impression that maybe the story was true and maybe it wasn't?—if you left it up to them, like the author's point in The Guardsman?

One third of the history is based on what I have experienced myself, about one third on the experience of a very good friend whose drinking career I followed very closely, and the other third is pure invention.

Scott Fitzgerald has the one thing that a novelist needs: a truly seeing eye. He sees so clearly, in fact, that his latest book has embarrassed those critics who have come to look to him for entertainment, not for such deeply searching stuff as this. What does it matter that Tender Is The Night fails as a novel?—which it does. While it lasts, it is the most brilliant and heart-breaking performance you will find in recent fiction.

The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.

Who are you writing to, Linus?" "This is the time of year to write to the Great Pumpkin. On Halloween Night, the Great Pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys for all the children!" "You must be crazy! When are you going to stop believing in something that isn't true?" "When *you* stop believing in that fellow with a red suit and the white beard who goes, 'Ho, ho, ho!'" "We're obviously separated by denominational differences.

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

Japan holds steadfast to the fiction that it did nothing wrong, that it was trapped by circumstances—the theme struck by Hirohito on August 15, 1945, and, unfortunately, perpetuated by some historians in 1995.

She's got zero interest in honest-to-goodness human-on-human action. No. It's magic farmyard creatures or nothing for her.

All children in adventure books have to be orphans.

Books aren't just books they're a completely different world in the palm of your hands

You can't write any form of fiction unless you enjoy reading it. You must be sincere in your approach. It's no good despising the form. So many people think they could earn some money from writing something for which they have no affection. It won't work. The first thing you have to have is belief.