Quotes About Fiction

The law of thermodynamics, you know, the idea that nothing is lost, that a loss in one area equals a gain in the other, was actually not invented by scientists but by the people who write redemptive fiction. [...] Actually, in real life, we lose things all the time and they're gone. Lost, period.

We watched the swimmers and sunbathers and I thought about this. Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts you were allowed to have faced. Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who've really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind.

Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who've really faced the facts.

Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author's life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.

Happy-ever-after is a fairy-tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive.

Fiction is like wrestling with angels-you do not expect to win, but you do expect to come away from the experience changed.

The Baba gives me paper, and a pen that sputters ink. Write, she says, tell the true Though you may have to lie to do it.

The storyteller in me asks: what if? And when I try to answer that, a story begins

How can this be, this great magic, that makes real the unreal, the not-actual into a kind of factless fictual, turns lies into the True? Don't ask me, for I am new at this work, new at telling my own truth. All I can start with is Once Upon A Time, that oldest and truest of lies.

I almost never shoot people.

If I could just get Broom to cooperate, we could fly, Glo said. Then we wouldn't have to worry about traffic. Harry Potter didn't have to worry about traffic. You relize Harry Potter isn't real, right? Of course, but he could be. I mean, maybe not Harry Potter, but someone like him. Who's to say?

Superheroes are make-believe. Oh yeah? Lula said. What about God? Hmmmm.

Say what? There's no 'and he got naked and waved his magic wand?' 'Nope,' Connie said. 'No magic wand. She didn't get to see the wand.' 'Well, you know he got one,' Lula said. 'How come he didn't wave it and make her a happy princess?

zombie, all you have to do is douse your shop in my stink spray.

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They're all parts of yourself.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I can't write unless I've got the voice for a character.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

I think, unlike other superheroes, what one gleans about the Musketeers, certainly from the source material, is that the good that they do happens in quite a spasmodic manner, in short bursts.

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

Slipstream fiction is usually defined as fiction with a contemporary setting in which story elements are mimetic (that is, seem real) - except for one or two eerie strangenesses. Unlike outright fantasy, these are not explained or integrated into an alternate-reality setting.