Quotes About Fiction

So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

Stumbling across the truth isn't the same as making things up.

Like all good works of fiction, it lies like the truth.

Any kind of survival information from encyclopedias, biographies, anything that helps you learn to live off the land and defend ourselves. Even some fiction might be useful.

Até mesmo um pouco de ficção pode ser útil [...] se você não precisar dessas informações, elas não serão prejudiciais. Você só vai saber um pouco mais do que antes.

Philo Vance / Needs a kick in the pance.

We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture.

I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on. -Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Than to suppose that they like what is human and real, he means," said Beltran. "They don't care the least about that; they like a little broad farce, a little rough murder, and a little rosewater sentiment: anything more bothers them. They can't understand it.

With which he deposited two or three of the penny numbers of fiction on the little table, and regarded himself, it was evident, as a person of princely liberality.

Some report elsewhere whatever is told them; the measure of fiction always increases, and each fresh narrator adds something to what he has heard.

There is a great deal of solemn discussion about The Novel. In fact, every novel is an answer to the ancient plea, 'Tell us a story.

Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog

Jincy Willett, Sam Lipsyte, Flannery O'Connor, and George Saunders. Oh, and I love Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker.

Le romancier est le seul menteur qui ne tait pas le fait qu'il ment.

Is it like a Harry Potter thing?" He turned his head then. "A what?" "A Harry Potter thing," she said again. "You know, don't say Voldemort's name because you might attract his attention?" He considered it. "You mean the children's book." "I have got to get you to watch more movies," she said. "You'd enjoy these. Yes, I mean the children's book.

Anna: "I thought Indians built fires with fiction." Charles: "I can do that, but I'd like to eat sometime in the next day or so. Sterno and Bic are much faster.

Why is it that in all the adventure movies the heroine doesn't have to get up and go to work?

Thank you for tearing Tim into small Tim bits.

They're our scary-dangerous werewolves., and they only eat people they don't like.