Quotes About Fiction

One of the most important jobs of the entrepreneur is to use his mind to create order, to organize information, and to separate fact from opinion or fiction. This requires time and time management.

Fiction writers can't be trusted. They make things up.

Do not let the truth get in the way of a good story.

I might be a thriller writer, but I know all about romance." "That's pretty obvious from your love life," the kid sassed back. "Oh, wait. You don't have one.

She stumbled as if in a dream. But this wasn't a dream. It was a real dead body…in Papa's trunk.

ALSO BY DANA STABENOW

in the grave / Dana Stabenow.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-312-55913-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4299-5038-1 (e-book) 1. Shugak, Kate (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Alaska—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title. PS3569.T1249R47 2012 813'.54—dc23 2011037662

Historical fiction isn't history in the conventional sense and shouldn't be judged as such. The best historical novels are loyal to history, but it is a history absorbed and set to music

SANTIAGO RONCAGLIOLO: I always start from real emotions and experiences because I think that gives the narrative a lot of force. But the act of writing consists precisely in distorting those facts through fiction, injecting them with lies, until fantasy overtakes reality. The truth is never enough. That's why I write novels.

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.

Science fiction inspires scientists, but it doesn't exist to dictate what our future should look like. Great science fiction is fun to read and it makes you think, period. Claiming anything more than that is dicey. Grand visions of the future were more prevalent in the golden-age science fiction, but all fiction is a reflection of the current times. As science moves more quickly, the horizon of science fiction tends to recede closer to the present.

I think that nothing is 'just' fiction, as jokes are never 'just' jokes and entertainment is never 'just' entertainment. That's not to say they can't be entertaining or ridiculous, but all of them also address more serious topics in ways that might not be possible through 'serious' communication.

But the remembering is imperfect; the instructions for which neurons need to be gathered and how exactly they need to fire are weak and degraded, leading to a representation that is only a dim and often inaccurate copy of the real experience. Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just replaying, but a rewriting.

'Doctor Who' is where my love of science fiction and fantasy started. I was introduced to it when I was 8, and I'm still an avid viewer.

The idea of viewers getting invested in a series is that you're getting invested in the reality of these characters' lives that, in fact, don't have an ending.

When viewers watch shows, they should relate to the story. There has to be a blend between reality and fiction.

There are lots of great characters in fiction who viewers and readers have engaged with that behave badly. Great characters can be unfaithful. They can lie and cheat.

All my books are adventures, but they also have a social viewpoint.

All writers, in all viewpoints, must choose which information and scenes will be presented, and in which order. In that sense, the author is always represented as a point of view in a work of fiction. His hand can always be detected by the discerning.

I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.

Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway.

As a reader, I notice political views regardless of whether or not the book is fiction. What annoys me is when said views do nothing to advance the narrative.

I love the writing of Walter Tevis and what he views as the possibilities of science rather than science fiction.