Quotes About Fiction

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

Only if this were a film would I consider it real.

the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact.

I found out after reading quite a lot of it that it is not rated very high. He has a very descriptive way of writing but also lengthy. May not want to finish!!!!! This was his 1sr and only try ast Historical Fiction!

I find novels compose my mind. Do you read novels too? - Reverend Finch's wife

Another friend of mine defines writing as: Torturing your characters for fun and profit.

Do what you will, this life's a fiction, And it is made up of contradiction.

Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous!

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Love reads like a bad biography all the names are changed to protect the innocent

To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.

The future is there, Cayce hears herself say, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys' game.

All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers' existence during the time the fiction was written.

Something stilled the part of him that knitted narrative, that grew the underbrush of lies in which he lived.

subgenres are products of the writers' urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic

one can't really enjoy what science fiction does without being able to recognize the point at which the imaginary lifts off from the known.

I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.

Is this a kissing book?

Truth is terrific, reality is even better, but believability is best of all. Because without it, truth and reality go right out the window….

Not that it matters, but most of what follows is true.