Quotes About Fiction

Jasper Fforde

Emperor," I said, "if a character has run its course, then it's run its course. What do you want me to do? Go and talk the author out of it?" "Would you?" replied Zhark, opening his eyes wide. "Would you really do that?" "No. You can't have characters trying to tell their authors what to write in their books. Besides, within your books you are truly evil and need to be punished.

There were no characters or events written in, which was a shame—considering the work he did on the world itself, this might have been a bestseller.

Jasper Fforde

Whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls fiction! . . . Metaphor should be controlled. A glut on the market would make fiction overtly highbrow, painfully ambiguous, and potentially unreadable.

Quark, said the Quarkbeast.

fiction always surpasses reality but reality is always richer than fiction.

Es mentira, lo repito, que las novelas sirvan sólo para pasar el rato, para matar el tiempo; al contrario: sirven, de entrada, para hacer vivir el tiempo, para volverlo más intenso y menos trivial, pero sobre todo sirven para cambiar la forma de percepción del mundo del lector; es decir: sirven para cambiar el mundo. La novela necesita ser nueva para decir cosas nuevas; necesita cambiar para cambiarnos: para hacernos como nunca hemos sido.

Así son siempre las leyendas, ¿no? Una mezcla de verdades y mentiras. Sólo que, si sumas una verdad y una mentira, el resultado es siempre una mentira.

He llegado a la conclusión de que la realidad mata y la ficción salva.

All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction

empecé a decirme que una buena mentira no es una mentira pura, exenta, que una mentira pura es una mentira inverosímil, que, para que sea verosímil, una mentira tiene que construirse en parte con verdades, y

What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.

He smiled. Thought you said you weren't a romantic. I'm not. She turned another page. Doesn't mean I don't like to read about romance.

The old slogan 'truth is stranger than fiction,' that still corresponded to the surrealist phase of this estheticization of life, is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously-it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality-radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.

It has to be written, if only to lock away the real key to the story in a single page, and remove that page once the book is finished, so that no one will know what it is all about - as ever, the perfect crime. However, it must be possible for that page to be reconstituted without its secret being revealed, and this dispersal is the very mainspring of theoretical fiction.

Theory is never so fine as when it takes the form of a fiction or a fable.

I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.

Cause I'm telling you, I read all the time. Seventy-five novels last year, I counted! Well, Goodreads counted.

countered. "I suspect the story was made up by a woman who had a

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

I didn't want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it's rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.