Quotes About Fiction

I could never write about strange kingdoms. I could never do 'Harry Potter' or anything like that. Even when I did science-fiction, I didn't write about foreign planets and distant futures. I certainly never did fantasies about trolls living under bridges.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.

One of the strange things about imaginary food is that it allows us to take pleasure in reading about things that we would never want to eat in real life.

I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.

Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration.

A lot of 'Stranger Things' is having to be able to, in your mind, turn a little tennis ball into a huge monster. In Season 2, there was one scene where I was screaming at the monster and I was screaming at nothing. It was just the sky. So I really have a big imagination, I guess?

Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.

The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.

I certainly keep my eye on Washington all the time because often life is stranger than fiction.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

As I had visualized, 'Heroine' is shaping up to be a very contemporary film with a different premise and strata. This film, like most of my other films, is a blend of facts and fiction. The film has a larger span, more characters, and costumes... a journey that revolves around an actress's life and the showbiz.

They could draw many parallels between dolphins and Xenomorphs.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

Real life is generally very haphazard in its plotting, and I think a lot of people lament that, and turn to fiction to briefly experience, albeit vicariously, a more satisfying sort of reality. We want to see *sense* -- not necessarily happy endings, but effectual actions and significant outcomes. (Postmodern fiction and metafiction, I gather, aim to call attention to the falsity of these things, which is like selling liquor that perversely makes you more sober).

maybe it explodes. No reason to think it will, except for the way a lifetime of consuming fiction makes me associate countdowns with things exploding.

As a report released by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee put it, the Russians sought to "blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself." It took years before Americans understood this.

As someone who read exclusively nonfiction for nearly 15 years, I can tell you two things: It's not productive to read two fact-based books at the same time (this is one), and fiction is better than sleeping pills for putting the happenings of the day behind you.

From an actionable information standpoint, I consume a maximum of one-third of one industry magazine (Response magazine) and one business magazine (Inc.) per month, for a grand total of approximately four hours. That's it for results-oriented reading. I read an hour of fiction prior to bed for relaxation.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein