Quotes About Fiction

As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!

What if most fiction is, at best, moderately important? What if it is so vague and culturally drivel-some, and so mediated by everything else once the culture industry extrudes it through a writer-shaped nozzle, that our stern declarations about subversive literature are, mostly, kind of adorable?

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.

The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.

My theory of the uses of fiction is that benificent fiction calls into full life our total range of imaginative faculties and gives us a heightened sense of our personal, social and human reality.

There is no story that is not true.

Doesn't the imagination always exaggerate—or diminish—truth?

You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

Instead, we spent our downtime prodding at lifeless characters and wondering how long a human body could subsist on a diet of ramen and Coke before liver function ceased entirely.

Gloriously, I've also learned that people you meet in real life are very unrealistic. The marvelous problem for fiction is to capture this preposterous, implausible and blazingly eccentric life, and to put it in a cell overnight, to sober it up until it reads believably on the page. That's what a novelist is: I'm not a creating god, I'm reality's jailor.

It looked very similar to the screwdriver used by the time-traveling hero of the dragons' favorite television program.

They reminded Kyle of a Greek god and goddess straight out of the Percy Jackson books. "Wow," said Miguel. "Do you think Rick Riordan's going to be here? That would be so awesome!

Sorry, Tom," said Mr. Lemoncello. "At the Lemoncello Library, we value the truth more than myths." "What about all those Percy Jackson books you have?" fumed Edison. "Those are myths!" "And they are correctly shelved as fiction.

But Pinocchio's just a story," said Billy. "It's not real." "That's exactly what I told Dr. Libris! When I did, he shook his head and said I had 'no imagination whatsoever.' Ã¢â'¬Â "That's awful." "Yeah. Dr. Libris can be kind of crabby. That's why I never rowed out to his island except that one time. Didn't want him going all grumpy on me.

I'd been reading one of her new stories. It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women're supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos.

I'd love to see the Iron Jackal's face when he finds out I'm already dead," he said with half a grin. "Now that's irony." "No it ain't, Cap'n. It's just some shit that happened.

It's not real. The image of his creepy ant-hands was nothing more than a standard, slightly silly hallucination.

How serious can a movie about time-traveling robots be? You want it to be cool and fun.

I do care about real life. It's just not as interesting as what's in my books.

We're happier when the assholes are villains.

History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.

Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.