Quotes About Fiction

Just so you know, when they say Once upon a time" . . . they're lying

Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

You can't be real, Delilah murmurs. Says who? I ask. Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?

You may be real, but you're still stuck in a book.

Talking out loud to fictional characters is just the tip of the iceberg.

The fictive structure, my work, my imagination, my books are about the details, the huge construction about culture, Islamic culture or modern Turkey. They're all intertwined.

It's so often that I read for the bouncy, sunny girl men fall in love with who will solve all the romantic problems in the narrative. I don't choose to work that way.

No one stays true. Its like an addiction cuz aint no one real...its all fiction.

A lot of books in the self-help section of your bookstore really belong in the fiction section.

Elizabeth disliked the tragic, martyred image of Virginia Woolf which grew up after her death. When she read the first volume of William Plomer's autobiography, At Home, in 1958, she told him that 'only you seem to bring back Virginia's laughter - I get so bored and irked by the tragic fiction which has been manufactured about her since 1941.

Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world beside our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.

Let's see, he had told me one night at our hotel's bar, I've been beaten to death with brass knuckles by Robert Mitchum, knifed in the back by Ernest Borgnine, shot in the head by Frank Sinatra, strangled by James Coburn,

And I realized again that real life is different from reel life.

The real aim of romance is to provide escape and entertainment.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Number one rule for fiction: Coincidence can be used to worsen a character's predicament, but never to solve his problems.

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

I dream of things that never were

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.