Quotes About Fiction

Unfortunately, this is so obviously a convention of bad fiction that it might as well read, 'Looking in the mirror, Joe saw a tall, brown-haired man, trapped in a poorly written novel.

Any of the following crimes against fiction can prevent the publication of your novel. Committing several will prevent the publication of novels by anyone whose name is similar to yours, just in case.

Gonzo journalism… is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. It's incredibly annoying for us scribblers.

I think that Ryu Chishu, or Tanaka Kinuyo, or to be more precise, the imaginary characters they portrayed, were more real to the film buffs than any existing human being. This is why cinephiles are spookier, on the whole, than music lovers or balletomanes. For they are creatures of the dark, getting off on the lives of others.

In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.

Ian McDonald

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

Something that doesn't actually exist can still be useful.

Was it that bureaucracy, taken to extremes, became oppression? Or that oppression needed the fiction of legality, a craving for the respectability that it could never have?

When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.

The reward is that you can actually create a world separate from reality with a story, actors, music, and camera design. When it works it can entertain, move people and teach us all.

Reality always manages to make things much worse than that of which imagination can conjure.

it is a truth of historical fiction that all the characters are long dead; all the lives and stories have ended, and usually not well.

Resist demonstrating that your worldliness was more fiction than fact," he whispered. "You, Lady Agatha, in the common parlance with which you are so fascinatingly familiar, 'ain't so tough.

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

A literatura é o catálogo de vidas possíveis

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power. ("Mind Over Murder")

This story is true. Of course, there are many lies therein and most of it did not happen, but it's all true. In that sense it is deeply religious, perhaps even biblical.

When we front a fiction, we are destined for loneliness.

You need to understand that truth is stranger than fiction. Listen: people are willing to swallow any old tripe as long as you say it without flinching. They want to be told stuff. And they don't want to doubt you either. It's too hard.

And I realize I've been betrayed by the two vices that fiction promised me I'd adore. Sal Paradise held up bottles of booze like a housewife in a detergent commercial. Holden Caulfield reached for his cigarettes like an act of faith. Even Huckleberry Finn tapped on his pipe with relief and satisfaction. If sex turns out to be this bad, I'm never reading again.