Quotes About Fiction

In some ways, every character we write, especially the protagonist, is some version of ourselves, as a writer/director, even if they aren't the same gender.

What remains difficult to fathom is how White, a president of the American Historical Association, justified to himself his grotesquely unhistorical (mis) use of sources—from resorting to the romanticized fictions of Washington Irving for "facts" about Columbus to the strategic truncation of a quotation from St. Augustine to make the African Doctor appear to say something exactly opposite to what he meant.

The idea of a large number of vampires in Miami, whether actual or fake, was a little bit alarming—even if only for aesthetic reasons. I

The mythology began here. On the day. At the moment. Only nobody knew it. As the years passed and the legend grew, it became an increasingly daunting challenge to separate fact from fiction; giant from gnat. That's what happens when we anoint our heroes with nicknames and expectations and an unusual largeness generally reserved for skyscrapers and grand canyons.

James M. Cain (1892–1977) wrote two indisputable masterpieces, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

the Nero Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award.

parking space—44 Eaton…? He flicked it quickly back

Twenty-one Short Stories by Graham Greene.

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights...How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before!...There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

Real life doesn't live up to writing about it

The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.

Sure. Martinis. We can pretend we're Salinger characters.

Lee stood in front of the class the first day and said, "Anybody who makes fun of romance fiction is making fun of Jane Austen, and anybody who makes fun of Jane Austen answers to me." Why yes, I would walk across broken glass for that man. Why do you ask?

Jennifer Crusie

I wonder if life is still something I can make up.

She'd lost her taste for fiction. Sometimes she thought it was because spending even a few hours in an imaginary world would make it too tempting for her to consider other versions of her own story, other ways it could have unfolded. A different ending, a true happily-ever-after.

Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

We were pretending, and everybody knew you didn't get hurt pretending.

The Kiowa didn't scalp, and the real Mescalero did not live in pueblos, but factual accuracy, for May, was something that happened to other writers).

And the and-then-I-woke-up-and-it-was-all-a-dream ending is simply inexcusable in fiction intended for an audience over the age of four.   The Golden Bottle will take two hours from the readers' life that they won't get back.

Alice was not aimed at changing anyone's mind. There is no moralizing or didactic aspect to Alice and Through the Looking Glass. Both are nonsense satires which lampoon adults but make no attempt to instruct children and are nearly absent of sentimentality. This was revolutionary in children's fiction and allowed for the maturation of the genre.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character—what we believe—none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!