Quotes About Fiction

In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.

I want art that makes the world seem more unreal. I want fiction that can crumble the world and build it back into something new.

Makebelieve is a writer's best friend.

A sarcastic blond genie with a bad attitude. -Clary, pg.243-

He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.

We don't grow fangs, you idiot!

Lo que pasa con la vida real es que, cuando haces alguna estupidez, sueles acabar pagándola. En los libros, los protagonistas pueden cometer tantos errores como quieran. No importa lo que hagan, porque al final todo sale bien. Derrotan a los malos, arreglan las cosas y todo acaba guay.

A ghost! Mr. Crepsley shouted. Absurd! Absolutely, Gavner agreed with a grin. Vampires don't believe in crazy things like ghosts, do we, Larten?

thing I was sure the Little People could never do. In a creaky, slow, mechanical tone — he spoke. "Name . . . not Lefty. Name . . . Harkat . . . Harkat Mulds." And his lips spread into a jagged gash, which was as close to a smile as he could come.

In fiction classes... you find that epiphany has a pretty high rate of occurrence... But when you tell your own story honestly, that epiphany thing is rare... The only changes are emergencies or blessings: when you wake up, notice the surroundings, then fall back, and wander more. And if you're lucky you end up walking again through a life where you're never called on to do much noticing.

Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!

Live an adventure. Live like you're in a story.

Words are too easy," he says. He opens his book. "What looks like truth and sounds like truth might be nothing but a dream, nothing but a story I wish had happened.

If you can't live in the world you have, make one up.

The health of an enlightened and progressive society is measured by how vibrant is its science fiction, since that is where true self-critique and appraisal and hope lie.

and deeply seductive, storytelling tropes that you see in cinema.

Analog, or Asimov's Magazine, or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

It's only a story, isn't it?... Who's to say what's only a story and what's truth disguised as a story?

Good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. [Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction , Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art.

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.