Quotes About Fiction

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

C'est lui qui reprend la parole : et vous ? Vous allez écrire sur cette histoire, n'est-ce pas ? Vous n'allez pas pouvoir vous en empêcher. Je répète que je n'écris jamais sur ma vie, que je suis un romancier. Il sourit : encore un de vos mensonges, pas vrai ? Je souris en retour.

J'ai fait de ma fille un être de papier. J'ai tous les soirs transformé mon bureau en théâtre d'encre où se jouaient encore ses aventures inventées.

The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.

It was there. In my mind. After the call I'd just taken, after talking with LaForce. But I wouldn't say it out loud. Wouldn't even let myself form the complete thought in my head. Wasn't believing it. No fucking way zombies were real. Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead – Fuck no. Fuck Milla Jovovich and all of that shit.

Reading" had always been my lifeline-- an escape to that imaginary world where hurts were fictional and endings happy...

All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can't be sure of a thing.

Fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.

I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.

I would designate as science fiction in the best sense: they are visions and anticipations by which we seek to attain a true knowledge, but, in fact, they are only imaginations whereby we seek to draw near to the reality.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

My sister and I visited Iceland in 2001, and I incorporated it into 'Pretty Little Liars.'

I do believe that sci-fi or historical fiction finds an easy home in comics because there are no budget constraints in regards to the necessary world-building or visual effects necessary to bring those stories to life in other mediums.

For me in my twenties, working in Hollywood was confusing in that the differences between what was fiction and what was nonfiction seemed to blur in my mind. Everything became a visual memory for me. I carried my Leica camera, giving opportunity to take pictures from my view.

One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.

The ghost story is a popular genre of mine and is particularly adaptable to the visual media.

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.

From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.

To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.

I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.