Quotes About Fiction

I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination. It develops your paranoia. You feel paranoid when you don't understand a country, and being paranoiac is excellent for fiction.

I'm not that into reading. If I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read some cool sci-fi book or something, not some stupid self-help book.

If the moral good of fiction stems mainly from a habit of mind it inculcates in the reader, styles are neither good nor bad, and to describe some fictional enterprises as false is pointless.

I've always been a mystery fan. My very first grown-up book, I distinctly remember going to the library and my mom helping me pick out an Agatha Christie book. I was in fifth grade or something and very proud of being in the adult fiction aisles. I tore through 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles.'

I wrote a story about a character who looks like Harry Styles. But it has nothing to do with Harry Styles at all.

We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other.

I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

I approach serious subjects, and I like to have the good guys win and have the parents among the good guys.

When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.

There's no subtext in 'Harry Potter,' really; it's all magic - anything can happen. Why do I say this? Because it's a magic spell. It's quite nice in a way. There is a real freedom to it. Doesn't say much for acting, does it?

Most apocalyptic fiction makes it very clear that it's the end of the world. But 'Bird Box' hasn't convinced me of that. Is 'Bird Box' instead a suburban neurotic nightmare? I don't think so. But it's fun to consider.

You know, you can be really quite subversive in popular fiction, which is capable of taking on big issues of politics, war, the rise and fall of commercial dynasties.

The reason people get afraid of writing real, honest journalism and fiction, and the reason corrupted people and demagogues are afraid of journalism and fiction and poetry across the world, is because it is a subversive form.

Toda obra, toda novela, narra a través de la trama de los acontecimientos la historia de su propia creación, su propia historia.

To some baffled parents youth is stranger than fiction

A kiss may not be the truth but it is what we wish were true.

A novel is a piece of prose of a certain length with something wrong with it.

Roger Høibakk flirte og tenkte i det stille at han var heldig som hadde holdt seg unna familielivet. I kriminallitteraturen hadde aldri, eller nesten aldri, etterforskere familie, i alle fall ikke unger. Hverken i bøkene til Kim Småge, Gunnar Staalesen eller Anne Holt.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

It was a source of constant disappointment to Catherine Morland that her life did not more closely resemble her books. Or rather, that the books in which she found its likeness were so unexciting.