Quotes About Fiction

I have never believed in the axiom that a writer should first and foremost write about what he knows. I think it's a piece of misinformation.

Goodis's fiction contains a tortured beauty that can take one's breath away. He may not have been Dashiell Hammett. But then Hammett was no David Goodis.

Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage—that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.

Everybody is wearing a mask. It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Writing an autobiography means guessing or making up everything you've forgotten. I thought I'd already sufficiently described the character Ivan. In reality, I could no longer even remember him. Or rather: I was starting to remember him all too clearly, which could only mean this Ivan was now nothing more than my creation.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.

there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them

Sometimes life kicks you in the teeth with an irony that a self-respecting fiction writer would be ashamed to invent.

fictional character, this seemed to

But saying yes would feel like caving in, and Emma knew from novels that you should never cave in to marriage.

The presence of religion in science fiction is hardly surprising given its tendency to question limits and boundaries, and what could be more challenging than the limitation of mortality itself?

One of the most recurrent themes in science fiction is its examination of humanity's relation to its own material constructions, sometimes to celebrate progress, sometimes in a more negative spirit of what Isaac Asimov has repeatedly described as technophobia, through fictions articulating fears of human displacement.

one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you're not, and then to do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers, take note. Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.

Ignorance of fact is not evidence for fiction.

Do you have a surname?" "It begins with a C," said the boy. "Well, at least we have the first letter. It's like doing the crossword!" "Charper!" "Tom Charper!" said the man, scribbling it down on the form. "That's question one done. Just a hundred and ninety-one to go.

Now, are you familiar with the Lord of the Rings?" Molech hesitated again, realizing he was playing someone else's game, but with no idea what else to do. He said, "Yeah, old horror movie about a ghost girl who crawls out of a television?" "No, this is the one with wizards and elves. Ends with the midgets fighting in a volcano? It

He tried to imagine Dave walking around the streets of Tokyo. It was like picturing RoboCop in Middle Earth—

making our way through a theme movie night (we'd picked out four films in which the ending is probably the main character's dying hallucination: Taxi Driver, Minority Report, The Shawshank Redemption, and Mrs. Doubtfire). In

Not that you mind the killings! There's plenty of killings in your book, Lord..

The fictitious kleptomaniac's only crime was stealing imaginations

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

Although rumors persist to the contrary, there were no deaths while making the movie Ben Hur.