Quotes About Fiction

For fiction is not about life; it's about the troubles in life. That is why we read it. To understand, to grow, to believe, to hope. That all the troubles one faces in life can be overcome, eventually.

from ages seven through thirteen I felt a kind of age-loyalty to characters [ Out of the Garden ].

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography -- but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

Reading fiction—excerpts from National Book Award finalists, winners of the Pen/O. Henry Prize for short stories, or even Amazon bestsellers—has been shown to enhance theory of mind:

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

ever since she had read the girl's novel, a piece of artistry that struck her as wish-fulfilment at its most blatant...

Only the most pleasant characters in this book are portraits of living people and the events here recorded unfortunately never took place.

The pleasure of this kind of narrative is not that we think we are reading about the real world (although the story usually does map onto our world fairly closely), but rather that the wings of symmetry are unfolding around us; briefly we are on a planet where, as E.M. Forster says, there are no secrets and human behavior makes sense. I call this 'fiction.

Why not dream your own wonderful sequels? When you have finished a book, it can go on in your mind, the characters doing just what you want them to do.

For the record, I would have made a very lousy romance heroine.

I would have made a very crappy book heroine.

A wonderful thing one learns when one writes about imaginary kingdoms for a living is that, in fact, anyone can imagine anything, and if the writer is good, they can do it persuasively.

La noche, la duda y el miedo son poderosos hechiceros que han poblado el mundo de la ficción más que la mitad de los novelistas que han existido.

Storytelling draws on the magic of language to created Elsewheres. Writers use a linguistic sleight-of-hand to take an attribute, attach them to new objects, and create enchantment.

when the daily reality presents itself as uncomprehendable, we fashion our own myths and then hold those phony truths to be inalienable.

Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.

Initially, I began writing myself into my favorite shows. I was a detective on 77 Sunset Strip, the missing Cartwright sibling they never talked about on Bonanza, and the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. before there was a Girl from U.N.C.L.E., not to mention an active participant in the serialized stories on The Mickey Mouse Club.

She sighed again, wondering how she'd be described as a character in one of her much-loved romance books.

Marilyn Monroe wasn't even her real name, Charles Manson isn't his real name, and now, I'm taking that to be my real name. But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best.

Dangers were no more than odd imaginings, like ghost stories that children made up to frighten one another: things that couldn't possibly happen.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

There's no subtext in Harry Potter really; it's all magic, anything can happen. Why do I say this? Because it's a magic spell. It's quite nice in a way. There is a real freedom to it.

I could imagine that a character could do almost anything at any time, and that was the freedom of the whole thing. But keeping track of what was plausible for certain characters [was the challenge].