Quotes About Fiction

OMG YOU GUYS it has come to my attention that SOMEONE on the internet is saying that my fictional 19th century zombies are NOT SCIENTIFICALLY SOUND. Naturally, I am crushed. To think, IF ONLY I'd consulted with a zombologist or two before sitting down to write, I could've avoided ALL THIS EMBARRASSMENT.

Besides, if comics have taught us anything, it's that death is rarely a permanent condition." "But we're not superheroes," May argued. "Speak for yourself," Jackdaw told her.

real life can be fascinating, it isn't as marketable as a tale with a plot.

I'd reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn't have. I

Any reader unable to distinguish between the historical and fictional elements of the plot is urged to seek professional help as quickly as possible.

About John Updike's Rabbit Run] The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting in themselves, or that their plight has implications that transcend their narrow world.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

Vic smelled the vast vault filled with books before she saw it... She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

...truth cannot overcome its old habit of being stranger than fiction.

Most contemporary fiction, like most contemporary theater, is designed to corroborate your fantasies and make you walk out whistling. I don't want you to whistle at my stuff, baby. I want you to be sitting on the edge of your chair waiting for nurses to carry you out.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Everybody must have a story. For those who don't, we need to invent one.

Thus, in addition to his double life as a spy, Defoe also led a dounle life as an economist- without realizing it, he created the central character in free market economics in his fictional work, umyet his own economic analysis clearly illustrated the limits of free market and free trade.

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there's that SCI-FI shit.

Losing maturity in one's fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that's not always a bad thing.

This is the fiction that I'm referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.

All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.

It's not Sci-Fi, we insist, It's SF. Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level.

For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like.

So, fuck 'em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We're GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker's jackets.

To write good religious science fiction, or indeed good religious fiction of any kind, is a challenge but one that it would be worthwhile trying to meet. It seems a pity the field has been apparently abandoned to pernicious rubbish like 'The Da Vinci Code', though this seems already, mercifully, to have faded away. In this, as in other areas, we could do with another C. S. Lewis to re-state the principles of Christianity in terms to stir the imagination.

Everything you look at can be turned into a story ... you can make a tale of everything you touch.