Quotes About Fiction

And that's why I've chosen to write these pages as I've written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.

Elle ne s'intéressait pas aux livres dans lesquels les enfants grandissaient, car (dans la vie comme en littérature) ce processus entrainait un affaiblissement accéléré et inexplicable du caractère ; de façon totalement inattendue, les héros et les héroïnes renonçaient à leurs aventures pour un amour insipide, se mariaient et fondaient une famille, et, en général, se comportaient comme un troupeau de vaches.

W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?

M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.

When Slenderman screams, the world will end.

Slenderman is looking at you.

compared Voldemort to a character from Chitty

I have taught history on the high school and college levels, and am or have been a lecturer at the Smithsonian, The National Institutes of Health, and numerous colleges and universities, mostly on science fiction and technology subjects.

Today's "fully developed scene," consequently, tends to run shorter than it once did. You may encounter scene situations where you simply can't develop all the complex immediate issues in fewer than a dozen pages. If so, that's fine. But I suspect that the average, "developed" print-fiction scene today runs between four and six pages, and some are shorter than that.

But the reality is that sometimes a good lie may be what we really need. Provided we can make it sound like truth.

Can a literary character be said to live a life from birth to death or otherwise to undergo a development from beginning to end? Or is a literary character-fixed on the pages of a book, trapped forever in the same few words and actions-the very opposite of a living, developing human being?

But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.

I do a great deal of research. I don't want anyone to say, 'That could not have happened.' It may be fiction, but it has to be true.

Le réel doit être fictionné pour être pensé.

Death is a fiction created by people who live their lives in total unawareness. There is only life, life and life alone, moving from one dimension to another, another dimension to another.

Pero Tito, ¿qué esperabas? -respingó mi tío- ¿qué se casaran y tuvieran muchos hijitos? Es una historia de horror, de eso se trata. Los finales felices son un invento del cine, están pensados para que los espectadores coman más palomitas .

It's available at Amazon in both ebook and paperback editions right here: THE DEAD AMERICAN

Writers turn dreams into print.

All stories are true. But some of them never happened.

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

A woman has written yet another story that is not interesting, though it has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting.

I want to remember exactly what she said, but someone reading this does not mind if it is not exact: Please, says that someone, just choose one or the other and get on with the story. Give me fiction, if you have to—the approximation. Not the truth, along with your doubt.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.