Quotes About Fiction

Not even Spock had stayed aboard for that—he found breathing vacuum for any length of time to be aesthetically unpleasant.

Readers, continued Miss Winter, are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.

Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story.

For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist.

disregarded, by the wayside. It never failed. A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

It was like living entirely inside a book.

Jane Eyre. Villette. The Woman in White." "Middlemarch

Readers,' continued Miss Winter, 'are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.

No conviene encariñarse con los personajes secundarios. No es su historia. Vienen, se van, y una vez que se han ido ya no vuelven. Eso es todo.

But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.

Sometimes I try to imagine what happens to characters in books - after the books finish, I mean.

There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version.

I am the false character that follows the name around.

That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

Sometimes I think everything I've done since those years, everything around me in fact, I don't know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely—what—fictitious.

The tremendous bruising force of history, sometimes random, often without logic or resolution, may produce a work of fiction that leans for its effectiveness on structure and pattern, on a detailed unraveling of some old perplexity or anxiety, some lingering confusion out there, in three dimensions, where the blood is thick and real but the gunshots can go uncounted.

It is a curiosity of writing about angels that, very often, one turns out to be writing about men.

High-impact 21st century fiction is built on unique voices, uncommon characters, and tales that can only be told by a particular author. They're sui generis.

The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member or bookstore employee. That process is called word of mouth. Savvy publishers understand its power and try to facilitate its effect with advance reading copies (ARCs), samplers, first chapters circulated by e-mail, Web sites and the like.

To see how differently folks experience a work of fiction, check their comments on Goodreads. Are those people all reading the same novel?

The principle that characters do not want to change applies to more than just fiction.

You can't go on without a story any longer than you can read a book about nothing.

Vladimir Zazubrin, in 1918 a deserter from the White forces and later a lively writer of fiction and memoirs, shot by Stalin in 1938 for his frankness, recalled the hard life of the Cheka executioners: White, grey carcasses (undressed people) collapsed onto the floor.