Quotes About Fiction

its romantic embellishments – a

I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.

Ted looked at Everett's face. "Percival Everett. Didn't you write a book called Erasure ?" Everett nodded. "I didn't like it," Ted said. "Nor I," Everett said. "I didn't like writing it, and I didn't like it when I was done with it." "Well, actually, I loved the novel in the novel. I thought that story was real gripping. You know, true to life." "I've heard that.

I don't think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what's the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

The dragon is a creature of the imagination, because dragons do not exist.

To possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others: this I think captures our love of and our need for novels, for fictional accounts of the world that let us experience it beyond the limits of our own pair of eyes, to imagine it, provisionally, as it is seen and felt by someone else, however different that person may be.

Through fictions, we accommodate ourselves to a world that is not ours, much less ourselves. As psychoanalysts and child psychologists confirm, we cannot cope with reality without made-up stories

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.

Time travel is pure bullshit, impossible; nobody can defeat causality or entropy.

Peter F. Hamilton

Peter F. Hamilton

They used a bazooka to shoot the Warrior Angel, it was spectacular ineffective.

Peter F. Hamilton