Quotes About Fiction

This is the satisfaction of a successful work of fiction--the internal coherence that reality does not have. Life as lived is disordered, undirected, and at the mercy of contingent events.

The great cause of fiction is to weave a bag to carry truth.

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet

None of it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble with history. It's the one thing we have to make up for ourselves.

But didn't you know? Everything is made up.

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page

And we recall in Dickens' fiction how universal it is that a child looks after an adult, and how the adult remains so dependent upon the child that he becomes something worse than child-like.

fiction is a harsher, more demanding mistress than fact.

Looking back, she began to wonder if perhaps it was all just a story. As the years race inexorably on, and as all the people we know and love die, does the past turn into fiction, an act of the imagination populated by ghosts, scenes and images suspended forever in water glass?

The point then is to help break the false distinction between the idea that there are those who are whole and those who have a lack. For the true distinction is between those who hide their lack under the fiction of wholeness and those who are able to embrace it.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

It's a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.

All of this could have happened, and some of it did, but not in that way.

For a moment he felt almost as though he were back in his old life, not 'Lamar Burgess' but Don Wanderley, one-time resident of Bolinas, California, and author of two novels (one of which had made some money). Lover for a time of Alma Mobley, brother to defunct David Wanderley.

Evil is a convenient fiction.

The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth.

Our descriptions are an acknowledgment of our unspoken agreement with the reader that we are not simply telling a tale but evoking an imaginary world.

this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards, Dick wrote of these stories. In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.

I don't have time to read popular fiction. I'm too busy with work.' Secretaries, he thought acidly, read that junk, at home in bed at night. It stimulates them. Instead of the real thing. Which they're afraid of. But of course really crave.

Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke.

Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?