Quotes About Fiction

I'll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You're not so nice and polite in your fiction, he said. You're a different person.

Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

This kind of fiction doesn't interest me.

Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

All human giving is fiction giving. Only the Absolute nonfictively owns; hence only the Absolute can nonfictively give; hence the mortal who believes that he or she owns, stands no chance of receiving what the Absolute has to nonfictively give.

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.

It all started, like so many family stories, with a plausible fiction - honest mistake, faulty memory, bit of embroidered imagination that got repeated so many times it became family truth.

maura: i am isaac, will. me: don't be stupid. he's a guy. maura: no he's not. he's a profile. i made him up. me: yeah, right. maura: i did. no. no no no no no no no no no no no no no. me: what? no please no what no no please no fuck no NO. maura: isaac doesn't exist. he's never existed.

The day it happened, the week after it happened-those were not times I wanted to go back to. How I felt like I was trapped in a chamber of my own noise. Sitting in class and not being there at all. Sitting in a chair and fragmenting at the same time. Clutching to the random facts. Thinking the concept of a fact was itself a fiction. Because we live in a blur. All of us live in a blur.

True or not, every story has something it wants you to remember. True or not, every story has something it wants you to believe.

Reading is not life. Reading is creating life in your head.

É isso que o amor faz: que você queira reescrever o mundo. Que você queira escolher os personagens, construir o cenário, dirigir o roteiro. A pessoa que você ama senta de frente para você, e você quer fazer tudo que estiver ao alcance para tornar isso possível, infinitamente possível. E quando são apenas vocês dois a sós numa sala, você pode fingir que é assim que as coisas são, que é assim que serão

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, aposiopesis, the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots...

It's not a lie. It's a gift for fiction.

The novel has been the subject of several scholarly essays and has become a staple of college classes in contemporary fiction (and even the occasional philosophy class). Fifty-four rejections.

Right, I breast feed baby camels in my backyard just for the freaking fun of it. Just tell me where you live, Pinocchio, and save the baloney for lunch.

While the mini-series based upon novels generate a good deal of interest, it's these real-life dramas that tend to draw a larger audience. Why? I chalk it up to five simple words we use in every print or televised promotion. Five words: "Based Upon a True Story." Not made up in the mind of some typist, but true. Some say that truth is stranger than fiction

Most movies and TV shows get drugs wrong. Someone takes a bong hit and spends the next few hours laughing uncontrollably. Someone takes acid and steps into the Sergeant Pepper cover. Six Feet Under gets drugs right, so after taking the mushrooms, Claire and her friend hole up in the bedroom, using the sewing machine and wishing they lived in the nineteenth century.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.

Dev wondered if that was the job of fiction, to test-drive the impossible, to loosen our grip on conventional reality. He guessed that's probably what fiction writers would claim—if there were any left, that is.

I hate time travel.