Quotes About Fiction

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not exist except in our imaginations.

There are parodies of non-existent things.

I've never pondered my own life until I started watching fictional ones fight for theirs.

Pages entertain me more than pictures do.

Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination.

It's all true; only the facts have been changed.

It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them. I don't think I'll ever get over Melanie's death in Gone With the Wind. But I'm still so glad I got to know her.

We'd both already read several novels by Tóibín: The Master and The Story of Night and The Blackwater Lightship.

Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt from the limitations of physical reality, ought nevertheless to be logically faithful to their own assumptions.

The whole scene so reeked of penny romance that it bordered on the ludicrous . . . It was all really happening, but more like fiction come to life, a Waverly novel gone mad. Years later, Mark Twain would only half in jest propose that the American Civil War was to be blamed on Sir Walter Scott, that the people of the South had somehow persuaded themselves that the mythical era of gallant knights and fair damsels of Ivanhoe had come to life in Dixie.

See you in the funny papers.' Johnny Eager From all Johnny Eager - Private Eye books Johnny's favorite saying

I later spent a year studying Finnegans Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would never have undertaken—and he had an eye for genre fiction, including westerns, that I lacked.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn't as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy

It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.

For those who chose to build off modernism, fiction became a field for radical explorations in narrative form and voice. Writers set out in search of new techniques that could serve as sources of discovery and offer unique opportunities for amplifying the potential meaning of their subject matter.

Always. BATTLETECH ERAS The BattleTech universe is a living, vibrant entity that grows each year as more sourcebooks and fiction are published.

The world has been doing little else but playing at make-believe all its lifetime.

Oye, todo es verdad — replicó Francis —. Todo cuanto te pasa por la imaginación, aunque apeste a chorrada, es verdad.

In every good tale there is a seed of truth, and from that seed a lovely story grows. Some of what I've told you is true and some . . . well, let's just call it the bloom on the rosebush.