Quotes About Fiction

I know a small part of you thinks you could've ended up with Natalie Portman if you had played things a little differently. That's nice. You can have that. That's not hurting anybody.

Um, Mindy is much less like Elizabeth Bennet than she is a combination of Carrie Bradshaw and Eric Cartman.

I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn't just movies that couldn't contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end.

It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.

Un lugar tan hermoso no puede existir en realidad. Era literatura, era ficción, y nosotros éramos los personajes de un poema.

Hay un lugar en el mundo donde lo imposible es posible, se trata de la ficción, es decir, la literatura. Allí las leyes del cálculo de probabilidades pueden ser infringidas, allí puede aparecer un hombre más poderoso que el azar. El Ruletista no podía vivir en el mundo, lo cual es en cierto modo una forma de decir que el mundo en el que él vivía era ficticio, que era literatura.

caci abia acum se vadea ceea ce toti presimtisera intr-un moment sau altul al vietii lor: ca realitatea e doar un caz particular al irealului, si ca suntem totii, oricat de concreti ne-am simti, doar fictiunea cine stie carei alte lumi, ce ne creeaza si ne cuprinde ...

Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities.

Is that true? Are you really him?" "I am afraid I still hold that distinction." "You are Sherlock Holmes? No, I don't believe it." "That is quite all right. I scarcely believe it myself.

Julia progresses from cradle to grave, showing how government makes every good thing in her life possible. The weak economy, high unemployment, falling wages, rising gas prices, the national debt, the insolvency of entitlements - all these are fictionally assumed away in a cartoon that is produced by a president who wants us to forget about them.

Anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.

I often wonder if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.

There will always be a touch of fiction in non-fiction books and reality in works of fiction.

In the Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, the reader tries to reconstruct the past through participants and witnesses to that past, but what results is a blurred, ambiguous fiction within another fiction that recounts past events in accord with individual perspectives and interests. In this case, reality becomes fiction not only because the novelist fictionalized it but because the acts of remembering are so deformed or willfully mendacious that it is itself a fiction.

Vargas Llosas's fiction, in synthesis, tries to answer the question of what happens when two different and separated worlds are placed in confrontation.

But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone's breath fills a balloon's shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.

My friend Ian Hagemann, a regular at Wiscon, once said on a panel that when he reads science fiction futures that are full of white people and no one else, he wonders when the race war happened that wiped out the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn't mentioned such an important plot point.

The point of fiction is to cast a spell, a momentary illusion that you are living in the world of the story

The amount of insight to be gained from reading novels is tremendous.

My brother, Stephen, has always said I live in a world of fairy tales. That is laughable, though, because the books I read contain all sorts of murder and mayhem, usually committed with revolvers or knives, and once even a machete.

It was hard to believe that once upon a time, she had been afraid of pretend things. The real world was pretty darn scary on its own.

It was all a fiction, of course, because the land was not really inane ac uacuum—void and vacant. As the English conceived it, however, any land had to be taken out of its natural state and put to commercial use—only then would it be truly owned.6

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

I'm getting tired of Nancy Drew," I told my mother. "The books are all the same." Once I'd become attuned to the pattern of each plot, it became glaringly obvious how alike they were. Mom nodded sagely. "You've discovered the difference between good literature and trash.