Quotes About Fiction

But my daddy always said that story was a fish tale. That was his way of describing a trumped-up story, like a whopper

I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!

Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.

All good tales are true tales, at least for those who read them, which is all that counts.

Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true.

Fiction has the ability to show us what we don't know and what doesn't happen.

Lo que pasó es lo de menos. Es una novela, y lo que ocurre en ellas da lo mismo y se olvida, una vez terminadas. Lo interesante son las posibilidades e ideas que nos inoculan y traen a través de sus casos imaginarios, se nos quedan con mayor nitidez que los sucesos reales y los tenemos más en cuenta.

Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the most bearable place to be.

What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novelist's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.

Mindegy mi történik a regényekben, mert úgyis elfelejtjük, ha véget érnek. A lehetÅ'ségek és a gondolatok számítanak, amelyekre felnyitják a szemünket, és amikre fiktív történetükkel ráébresztenek; ezek tisztábban maradnak meg bennünk, mint a valós események kapcsán, és jobban megfontoljuk Å'ket.

nincs annál csábítóbb, mint belefeledkezni egy másik valóságba, még ha a képzelet szüleménye is; magunkévá tenni valaki más problémáit, és elmerülni a létezésében, amely – miután nem a miénk – sokkal könnyedebb)

In fact, nothing can be imposed on a writer of fiction, who doesn't need to ask permission to introduce any real person or sequence of events he happens to know about into his fiction; if he decides to, then nothing and no one can prevent him. We aren't trustworthy people and some of us are heartless, though I don't think I am.

As verdades inverosímeis prestam-se a isso e a vida está cheia delas, muito mais que o pior romance, nenhum se atreveria a acolher no seu seio todos os acasos e coincidências possíveis, infinitos numa só existência sem falar na soma das que houve e das que ainda decorrem. É sufocante que a realidade não imponha limites.

pánico viaja con facilidad en la ficción, o en lo que uno vive como tal.

el pánico viaja con facilidad en la ficción, o en lo que uno vive como tal.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

All writers are unaffiliated. The novelist, the poet, will understand the institutions they live within, including their religious traditions, as aggregate historically amended fictions. Appointing themselves as witnesses, they are necessarily independent of all institutions, including the institution of the family-which may be why nothing makes family members more nervous than the discovery that one of them is a writer.

The historian will tell you what happened. The Novelist will tell you what it felt like. And the historical fiction writer does both!

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies... Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative...A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind.

I understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind.

you may encounter intense inner resistance to disidentifying from your pain. This will be the case particularly if you have lived closely identified with your emotional pain-body for most of your life and the whole or a large part of your sense of self is invested in it. What this means is that you have made an unhappy self out of your pain-body and believe that this mind-made fiction is who you are.