Quotes About Fiction

Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match. ... One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.

Stein, Sol, Stein on Writing. Perhaps the best book ever written on the overall craft of fiction. Straightforward, practical, easily absorbed.

Todos nos inventamos historias diversas (que en el fondo son siempre la misma) para imaginar que nos ha pasado algo en la vida.

People accused him of being unreal, of not having his feet on the ground. But he'd been thinking, the imaginary wasn't the same as the unreal. The imaginary was the possible, that which is not yet. This projection toward the future contained -- at the same time -- both what exists and what doesn't exist. Two poles that continually change places. And the imaginary was this changing of places. He'd been thinking.

y poco a poco me convenzo más y más de que la ficción tiende al drama porque la vida es igual: se quiere algo, vivir, por ejemplo, desesperadamente, pero se tienen muchos problemas para conseguirlo".

Pensaba en darle las gracias a ella por haberlo salvado de andar por ahí- y ese, si uno quiere, puede ser el sentido del matrimonio: librarlo a uno de uno mismo e impedirle perderse en sus ficciones- creyéndose por encima del bien y del mal, comiéndose el cuento chino de su propio triunfo

You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction...

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Sentences that begin with 'You' are probably not true. For instance, when I write: "You are a pet human named Morlock being disciplined by your master, a Beowulf cluster of FreeBSD 22.0 servers in the year 2052. Last week you tried to escape by digging a hole under the perimeter, which means this week you may be put to sleep for being a renegade human." That's not true, at least not yet.

more earth-bound fiction and especially to shake off the 'Catholic novelist' tag, which first took hold with Brighton Rock; Greene would often say that he was 'not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic'.3 A memorable phrase, it is more accurate as a description of the second half of his career than of the first. Indeed, it seems that the middle-aged Graham Greene was trying to cover his intellectual and artistic tracks.

Cowper invented the idea of the 'armchair traveller': 'My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.'90

Horror writers are specialists in the worst-case scenario.

In modern physics, there is no such thing as nothing. Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy.

Fiction isn't what 'was'. It's 'what if'?

But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.

the greatest mercy fiction gives: proof that the worst the two of them have done to each other is just another tale worth reading together, at the end of the day.

After tens of thousands of pages, they've circled back to Tolstoy and are now a good inch and a half into Anna Karenina. Dot resumes the story with no trace of self-consciousness or shame, no hint that art and life have enrolled in the same drawing class. And that, for Ray, is the greatest mercy fiction gives: proof that the worst the two of them have done to each other is just another tale worth reading together, at the end of the day.

Rutherford's and Soddy's discussions of radioactive change therefore inspired the science fiction novel that eventually started Leo Szilard thinking about chain reactions and atomic bombs.

A telkhine was hunched over a console, but he was so involved with his work, he didn't notice us. He was about five feet tall, with slick black seal fur and stubby little feet. He had the head of a Doberman, but his clawed hands were almost human. He growled and muttered as he tapped on his keyboard. Maybe he was messaging his friends on uglyface.com.

You hit the Lord of The Titans with a blue plastic hairbrush.

Bad pony-men! BOO!

Excuse me, have you seen Death? Big guy with black feathery wings? Likes to reap souls?