Quotes About Fiction

I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.

Lies hurt people; imagination makes life more fun.

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.

You should have more faith in fiction. It lets you come sideways at the truth, which is the only way anyone ever gets near it.

Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood - Addison Goodheart pg. 84

Thus set up, pen in hand, for the sake of greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal? The

Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?

From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel. I mailed them to fictitious address.

That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, . . . it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker.

Fantasy is reason's sweetheart.

Happy is the novelist," claims Nabokov, "who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

fiction can't be written to comply with winning arguments.

Be completely fearless. [...]Write without constraints, or worrying about who you represent, or whether you should represent anyone, or who your audience is, or what you can or can't do with a female character, or a black character, or someone of restricted growth, or someone who's hugely fat. You must write total confidence that the fiction is its own justification.

The only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving toward genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my argument by writing well").

Characters you'll find difficult to forget (besides the two lead characters), include the astute Jim Traft, Sr., Molly's semi-outlaw brother Arch (Slinger) Dunn; faithful Andy Stoneham; kind-hearted Mrs. See; the rollicking cowboy, Curley Prentiss; the despicable villain, Hank Jocelyn; the supposedly deaf cook, Jeff Davis; Molly's embittered mother; Ring Locke, the range boss; and a host of other characters who play cameo parts.

She ain't a fact and neither do she make a good story when you tell about her.

they read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinship inherent in such relations but because she used black vernacular speech and rituals, in ways Subtle and various, to chart the coming to consciousness of black women, so glaringly absent in other black fiction.

It was an innocent question, made reasonable by the body of confused and often contradictory rumors that make Zora Neale Hurston's own legend as richly curious and as dense as are the black myths she did so much to preserve in her classic anthropological works, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, and in her fiction.

Hurston did make significant parts of herself up, like a masquerader putting on a disguise for the ball, like a character in her fictions.

If Wright, Ellison, Brown, and Hurston were engaged in a battle over ideal fictional modes with which to represent the Negro, clearly Hurston lost the battle. But not the war.

Zora," George Thomas informed me, "you come to de right place if lies is what you want. Ah'm gointer lie up a nation." Charlie Jones said, "Yeah, man. Me and my sworn buddy Gene Brazzle is here. Big Moose done come down from de mountain." "Now, you gointer hear lies above suspicion," Gene added.