Quotes About Fiction

They used to be particularly hideous if they'd recently won a literary prize. Their dialogue was so powerful and impenetrable it didn't require punctuation! So naturally they didn't require permission to slip-slide their hairy hands over the body of a young writer of genre fiction. In their minds, Frances virtually owed them sex in return for her unseemly mass-market sales of "airport trash.

Never spoil a good story with the facts.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

All I want is to write fiction. I am a drain on the system, dragging around my debts and dreams.

My mom was a real person. I am not a real person. She had convictions and took action. She has purpose and belief. She helped others. I help no one. She helped found that donation organization. I couldn't even write one thank-you letter for a refrigerator. All I want is to write fiction. I am a drain on the system, dragging around my debts and dreams. It's all I've wanted. And now I'm not even able to do that.

creativity and imagination are as crucial to the life writing project as they are to fiction and poetry. We'll explore, and attempt, both autobiography and biography in Part 4, and in activities you'll be able to form your writing into poetry and/or prose.

the beginning of David Copperfield, a novel by Charles Dickens. It may be fiction, but it raises issues crucial to the exploration of life writing and how it works. One of those issues concerns fact versus fiction, because how can anyone prove what they have only been told? Another is to do with the function of memory: incomplete memory doesn't prevent Copperfield from writing about himself.

a type I would never have met, only read about in books, for books were where you found life, without the effort of being in the real world.

Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

Labels don't mean much to me one way or another -- except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work -- one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for.

I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

There's no more doomed a struggle than a battle with the imaginary.

A well-constructed lie is assembled largely from the alphabet blocks of fact, which will as easily make a pyramid as a platform.

Uma mentira bem construída é montada em grande parte com os blocos de fatos, que podem erguer tanto uma pirâmide quanto uma plataforma.

In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.

When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it's like I go back into the dream.

Stories,' she says, 'are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.

Poppy's hands fall on to the book. 'Stories', she says, 'are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.

But she needed to write it down to make it into a story instead of the truth about her life.

see what is in his eyes: the truth. He knows that Justin's suicide note is a fiction. He knows that my tears are theatrical. He knows that I killed Birdie. And he knows that I know he knows.

Yes, tell us about Bryn." They'd said his name as if it were in italics, as if he were a character in a book.

Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.