Quotes About Fiction

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.

It was hard to separate the fact from the fiction...

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. Ironically

JUST SO YOU KNOW, 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.

the Aleph-Null campaign.

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

These arent your mother's zombies!

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

The common people?—pah. What are they to us? You and I, mein Freund, we are lords of the earth, the great ones, the major men, the makers of supreme fictions.

I was estranged from myself and all that I had once supposed I was. My life up to now had only the weightless density of a dream. When I thought about my past it was like thinking of what someone else had been, someone I had never met but whose history I knew by heart. It all seemed no more than a vivid fiction.

I hope I'm a fiction without real hope.

Brez pravega upanja upam, da sem fikcija.

But I reckon we can manage somehow. The important thing to remember, after all, is that it's meant to be a fun house; that is, a place of amusement. If people really got lost or injured or too badly frightened in it, the owner'd go out of business. There'd even be lawsuits. No character in a work of fiction can make a speech this long without interruption or acknowledgment from the other characters.

Two daiquiris withdrew into a corner of a gorgeous room and one told the other a lie.

When you sit down with a book, you are separating yourself out of your world for a few hours and getting lost in the story.

The only thing I'd tell Maude, if she was here, is that she runs the risk of sounding a little anti-man at times, don't you agree? All the husbands in her novels are stupid, insensitive, faithless individuals with murky pasts, empty heads, micro-penises and questionable morals. But I suppose she had a good imagination, as all writers must, and she was simply making things up.

That's not fair! You can't talk back to the Tales! They are all we have!

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

I, for one, get rather annoyed when I settle into a nice bubble bath with some Belgian chocolate and a mystery at my side only to discover that all of the characters in the latter are still alive at the end.

Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.

It's television, after all. No one is dead, even when they die.

Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.

News is almost more interesting to me than other people's fiction, if that makes sense. But other people's fiction in terms of design is still incredibly interesting to me.