Quotes About Fiction

Some books make us dream, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written.

People listen and accept because they have no option. The Super-class rules the world; their arguments are subtle, their voices soft, their smiles discreet, but their decisions are final. They know. They accept or reject. They have the power. And power doesn't negotiate with anyone, only with itself. However, all is not lost. In the world of fiction and in the real world, there is always a hero.

The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.

Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.

It was a dream world, a kind of Alice in Wonderland, with its kings and queens, princes and princesses, and our millions of loyal subjects. But it wasn't real, and it couldn't last.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

Ive lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once created, or produced, the art of fiction.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

I dated Siamese twins, I slept with Big Foot, too. Get me on Sally Jesse, put me on Donahue.

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.

fiction and lies are both works of creative art, and creation always reveals the creator.

I don't think it would be fun to write after inhaling art fumes. (What are art fumes?) No, I just make stuff up. It's easier that way.

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.

Celluloid heroes never feel any pain.

The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.