Quotes About Fiction

The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.

Veertien Dertien had men net zo goed kunnen overslaan, omdat er alleen maar onzin in staat. Ik heb helemaal geen zoon, laat staan dat hij een rondleiding over mij zou presenteren in zaal Concordia. Eigenlijk had men één tot en met twaalf net zo goed kunnen overslaan omdat immers alles onzin is. Ik kan het weten, ik schrijf al die bullshit.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.

Fiction harmless? Look at religion. Fiction harmless? Look at the oppressed masses content with their lot because they have embraced the lies imposed on them. History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget. That's

So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That's what all those criminals trade in: fictions.

Inofensiva, la ficción? Mira la religión. ¿Inofensiva, la ficción? Mira a las masas oprimidas, satisfechas con la suerte que les ha tocado porque se han creído las mentiras que les imponen. La historia misma es una pura ficción; una ficción provista de ejército. ¿Y la realidad? La realidad es una ficción con presupuesto ilimitado. Nada más. ¿Y cómo se financia la realidad? Pues con otra ficción: el dinero. El

The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious act and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

He admires these speculative worlds, that grow up in the crevices between truths.

In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.

When you're writing historical fiction, you are always looking for the untold story. You're looking for what has been repressed politically, or repressed psychologically. You are working in the crypt.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.

I felt a wish to be fictionalized.

Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.

as a writer] you take up a life in your imagination, in which you can live all the other parts of yourself that you didn't become. And you can live in all the eras; the fact that you happened to be born in a certain place, in a certain dictate - the imagination doesn't accept these limitations.

I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don't see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn't any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.

Utopia, after all, is not a place one can live.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

longing to trust someone; I was making life a fiction, or writing

No matter how hard you try to create a story that's completely fictional, parts of your own experience are bound to surface.