Quotes About Fiction

A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.

It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.

The corporation is not a person; it is a legal fiction backed up by guns and police and jail cells and taxing authorities and the regulators called government.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.

Novels teach the youthful mind to sigh after happiness that never existed.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history.

As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

History is a romance that is believed; romance, a history that is not believed.

Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

Robots have a rich and storied history in movies.