Quotes About Fiction

Fortunately for writers, literary characters don't have unions.

All of this educational work was enormously successful. Millions of Americans accepted the "head philosophy," the belief that Ego and "Social Reality" are neural fictions.

Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.

the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.

In the act of seeing through the symbolic fiction and thereby failing to recognize its efficacy, the cynic does not escape its influence. In fact, this influence is all the more powerful for its having become wholly inconspicuous, which is precisely what befalls the subject in the society of enjoyment.

The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.

I think the highest purpose of fiction is to show that all people are fundamentally worthy of mercy.

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "What now?", is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it's more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.

Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

I don't believe in inspiration at all. We live in a world that demands explanation. And fiction has the capability to offer explanations for things.

I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.

People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up.

I'm not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can't get my head around it.

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

Oftentimes, reality is much worse than what you can put in a movie.

Oh you know, I've been writing a novel.

Oh yeah, I grew up with comics. You know, I always like to describe myself as a 'narrative junkie.' I love novels, I love comics, movies, TV. If it's a good story, I'm hooked.

The box jellyfish takes you into an area of what I'd call science fiction. You feel like you've been dipped in hot burning oil. You burst into flames.

'Saving Grace,' even though fictionally it was set in Oklahoma, we shot it right outside of L.A.

When I'm writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I'm watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don't immerse myself in whatever's going on in whatever area I'm working in.

Something I found while writing 'Alice & Oliver' - a book that is unquestionably a work of fiction, but which also borrows details from my own life - is that writing the truth often requires invention and imagination.

I read 'Y: The Last Man' once a year.

In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.