Quotes About Fiction

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

I guess a bit part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors in U.S. fiction not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure. Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fiction because (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we're all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference.

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone.

On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging, generally and thematically, and even on a sentence-by-sentence basis—that it's okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading, for the rewards can be that much greater when one's mind has been exercised and thus (presumably) expanded.

A big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves … I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it.

characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any apparent similarity to real persons is not intended by the author and is either a coincidence or

The fake ring and fictional spouse. It's like you're inventing somebody you love just to seduce somebody else into helping you betray her. What's it like. It's like suborning somebody into you desecrate a tomb they don't know is empty.

Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food.

David Foster Wallace understood the paradox of attempting to write fiction that spoke to posterity and a contemporary audience simultaneously

I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy to an old man, Mr. Shulman. One day, I asked him where he was from. He said, 'Just east of here, the Rockies.' I said, 'Mr. Shulman, the Rockies are west of here.' He did a voilà with his hands, and then said, 'I move mountains.' That stuck with me. Fiction either moves mountains it it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

Basically what you're doing when you're writing fiction is telling a lie, he tells those of us in the seminar; and the psychology of reading dictates that we're willing to buy only what coheres, on some gut level, with what we already believe.

Children and adolescents play a nearly incomprehensible nuclear strategy game with tennis equipment against the real or holographic(?) backdrop of sabotaged ATHSCME 1900 atmospheric displacement towers exploding and toppling during the New New England Chemical Emergency of Y.W. CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)

I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy to an old man, Mr. Shulman. One day, I asked him where he was from. He said, 'Just east of here, the Rockies.' I said, 'Mr. Shulman, the Rockies are west of here.' He did a voilà with his hands, and then said, 'I move mountains.' That stuck with me. Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

The big thing (that really good fiction) can do is leaping over that wall of self and portraying inner experience and setting up a kind of intimate conversation between two consciousnesses . . . the trick is going to be trying to find a way to do it--and for a generation--whose relation to the long sustained, linear verbal communication is fundamentally different.

We're all terribly, terribly lonely. And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world. — David Foster Wallace, interview in Whiskey Island , Spring, 1993.

But fiction-writers tend at the same time to be terribly sef-conscious . Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people.

The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.

Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true. - from A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject in 1851.

All truth is fiction, really, for the teller tells it as he sees it, and it might be different from some other teller.

More wisdom is contained in the best crime fiction than in philosophy.

writing Jeeves stories gives me a great deal of pleasure and keeps me out of the public houses.