Quotes About Fiction

The moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm is done to me or to any other person.

Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. "Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room." The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

An idea does not need to be true in order to be believed, and the same could be asked about any other myth: Santa Claus, William Tell or Zeus.

Edmond found it deeply distressing," Winston continued, "that the human mind has the ability to elevate an obvious fiction to the status of a divine fact, and then feel emboldened to kill in its name. He believed that the universal truths of science could unite people—serving as a rallying point for future generations.

Edmond found it deeply distressing," Winston continued, "that the human mind has the ability to elevate an obvious fiction to the status of a divine fact, and then feel emboldened to kill in its name.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world'...

the world often seemed more like a template for fiction than something that should be indulged in for its own sake.

Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no "epilogues", so why should art or literature?

It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.

A True Born Englishman's a contradiction! In speech and irony, in fact a fiction

Though this was all but a fiction of his own, yet it had its desired effect; Atkins fell upon his knees to beg the captain to intercede with the governor for his life; and all the rest begged of him, for God's sake, that they might not be sent to England.

In 1719—at the age of 59—Defoe turned his attention for the first time to an extended work of prose fiction, presenting his account of events of which he had no direct experience. Robinson Crusoe, the account of the shipwreck and survival of one man, became a great success, and Defoe turned his full attention to his lucrative writing career.

people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person's emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters' thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together. This kind of picture is a lie. Things are forced to fit because the writer or the director or somebody wanted something in that didn't belong. And it doesn't feel right.

spend most of my free time at the library now, reading and soaking up what I can from books. I'm not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now—Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner—everything I can get my hands on—feeding a hunger that can't be satisfied.

I spend most of my free time at the library now, reading and soaking up what I can from books. I'm not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now—Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner—everything I can get my hands on—feeding a hunger that can't be satisfied.

I'm not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now - ... - everything I can get my hands on - feeding a hunger that can't be satisfied.

In Specter, history becomes what never happened. People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction.

I won't sacrifice my characters morals/intentions/motives for the sake of what I believe is right or wrong. If the action fits the character it will be written. That's that.

I was only eight when Sputnik was launched, and at that age the boundary between science and fiction is pretty blurry. Whichever way the process ran, I've been a fan of science and SF ever since.

My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.

The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.