Quotes About Fiction

Of course, he snuck all this in under the guise of pulp science fiction, baiting us into believing that maybe this is all just fantasy. Only once the story is over, and we take another look at the world around us, do we realize: It's all completely true.

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.

They know a million tricks, those novelists.

Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke. No wonder it's banned within Reich territory;

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

I am by profession, a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy. Nonetheless, Gloria Knudson lies in a box in Modesto, California.

Questi romanzieri conoscono un milione di trucchi. Prendete il dottor Goebbels; è così che ha cominciato, scrivendo narrativa.

No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise." "But," Paul said, "it deals with alternate present.

The danger from the imaginative mind cannot be overestimated.

But," Paul said, "it deals with alternate present. Many well-known science fiction novels of that sort.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock....

There is time, and there is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God.

Good intentions never wrote a story worth reading.

Novels and stories are not arguments; they set out not to convince, but to beguile.

The narrating voice that tells 'Middlemarch' is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.

I can't do that anymore. That was just fancy. I was spinning tales out of the air, nothing more than that; there was nothing solid in them. Maybe Pan was right, and I haven't got a real imagination. I was bullshitting.

No, I won't do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this drama for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction.

Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!

he was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he'd done and because he hadn't done more. Seething with outrage too, about Basel more than anything--as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he'd got wrong, as much by what he'd been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most distorted meaning.

I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, has been the same since.

If you don't know the fantasy life of a country, it's hard to write fiction about it.

Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another "useful fiction," and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I'm saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close.