Quotes About Fiction

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Everything has to be reconsidered, shaped anew. Autobiographical fiction, even if it is inspired by reality, by memory, requires a rigorous selection, a merciless cutting. One writes with the pen, but in the end, to create the right form, one has to use, like Matisse, a good pair of scissors.

I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.

Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.

Molly was arrested. Possession." I blinked at him. "She was possessed?

Bring it, Darth Bathrobe!

One does not simply walk into Mordor--except that was exactly what everyone in the story did anyway.)

Rip her dress off!" Bob shouted. Bob the Skull takes paperback romances very seriously. The next page turned so quickly that he tore the paper a little. Bob is even harder on books than I am. "That's what I'm talking about!" Bob hollered, as more pages turned.

Woof," said Billy the Werewolf.

That's just a fiction," I said, "a little game of protocol." "Little games of protocol are how one shows respect, especially to those with whom one does not get along famously well. It can be tedious, but generally is less trouble than a duel would be.

Esmerelda's blue and green eyes could have made Stevie remember being hired by Mister Snuffleupagus, if that was what she wanted.

Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.

Ultimately, nobody is predictable, least of all to himself…there wouldn't be any point in writing fiction otherwise.

Fiction, when it's done right, does in the daylight what dreams do at night: we leave the confines of our own experiences and go to common ground, where for a time we are not alone. Where we don't have to ask how it feels, because we feel it for ourselves.

Without desire how is it possible to make a story?

A story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate.

Length is weight in fiction, pretty much.

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

Anything that can be dreamed is true.

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.

But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?