Quotes About Fiction

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.

Films, fiction, can encompass a whole global vision on a particular subject with any story, whatever it is. You can play the story in whatever country with whatever language in whatever style you want to tell the story in.

With a book, she could at least visit with people, even if it was vicariously, even if they didn't exist beyond someone's imagination.

It's very rare that a character comes to mind complete in himself. He needs additional traits that I often pick from actual people. One way you can cover your tracks is to change the sex.

To most readers the word 'fiction' is an utter fraud. They are entirely convinced that each character has an exact counterpart in real life and that any small discrepancy with that counterpart is a simple error on the author's part. Consequently, they are totally at a loss if anything essential is altered. Make Abraham Lincoln a dentist, put the Gettysburg Address on his tongue, and nobody will recognize it.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored them all, though she didn't buy every one.

Paul Hiebert's Sarah Binks, the cover said.

There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.

Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic--the abnormally chromatic entity in "The Colour Out of Space" being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in.

When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.

I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie.

Anch'io, pertanto, mi impegnai, per civetteria, a lasciare qualcosa di mio ai posteri [...]; e visto che non avevo a disposizione fatti veri da raccontare —perché purtroppo non mi era mai successo niente di interessante— mi decisi a dire le bugie, ma bugie che si potessero riconoscere molto meglio di quelle che dicono gli altri: perché, infatti, almeno su un punto dirò la verità, se dichiaro che sto mentendo! (Storia vera, I, 4)

Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means, of resisting them.

I also mistakenly believed that the scariest stories came from imagination, not real life.

Just so you know, I begin, when they say 'Once upon a time'... they're lying. It's not once upon a time. It's not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

Because that's what stories do. They help you escape, and they give you the chance to do things you never imagined you would or could. They let you feel heartbreak you've never had and experience adventures from the safety of your own room. They are dreams for those who are still awake. They

I pulled word after word from my core, like silk for a spider's web, spinning a make-believe life. That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?" - Minka (The Storyteller)

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it really fall? If a character sits in a book and no one reads it, is he truly alive? As

The brain can do a lot of things, Olive said, but it can't distinguish between what's really happening and what you're imagining. That's why scary movies scare you and why you cry at Nicholas Sparks books.

What if the characters in a book had lives of their own after the cover was closed?

You can invent any fiction and call it a life. Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.

Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets, lies, stories. We all tell them. Sometimes, because we hope to entertain. Sometimes, because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.

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.