Quotes About Fiction

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

When in doubt, do what they do in books, was one of Gabriel's secret mottos and - that rarest of things - a principle that he actually lived by.

Usually my form of turning someone down was shoving a stake through his heart while smirking, Gotcha!

If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

Penderwick took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sleeve.

A large part of acting is just pretending. You get to work with these other great make-believers, all making believe as hard as they can.

ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE SECTIONS of Tom Lea's memorable novel, The Brave Bulls, deals with the visit of the impressario, Eladio Gomez, to a mythical bull ranch known as Las Astas, where the Homeric figure of Don Tiburcio Balbuena raises the finest fighting bulls in all Mexico. By a fortunate chance I was once able to pay a similar visit to the reality on which Las Astas was based, and I found reality to be fully as fascinating as fancy. In

Well, for starters, Abraham Lincoln didn't write 'To Kill a Mockingbird.

I'm a liar, but this is the truth. I

there is something useful about the focal point of a story being an animal...I think it is very important right now, with regard to preservation of nature, to try to inhabit non-human perspectives and to, in some way, use fiction as the laboratory it should be. To explore things that are outside of the norms and not use it for the novel of manners or the thing that has been done before. (from Bloom Aftertalk interview)

Some stories are true that never happened.

Dawn is purely a work of fiction, but I wrote it to look at myself in a new way. Obviously I did not live this tale, but I was implicated in its ethical dilemma from the moment that I assumed my character's place.

Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.

Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did.

El amor desesperado consiste en inventarse un personaje, exigir a la persona amada que lo represente y hundirnos en la miseria cuando se niega a convertirse en ese ser de ficción.

I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality.

So far we have had a séance, with spirit possession, a White Lady walking by night, a perambulating suit of armor, a diabolical character in a black cloak, and even a semi-dead man with a look of stark staring horror. It isn't even good horror fiction; it's straight out of The Mysteries of Udolpho. By some straining of the brain I could believe in ghosts; but I can't believe in a ghost that acts like Terror Comics.

I can't read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.

JARRY: (To audience) As to the action which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland - that is to say, nowhere.

There's no point in making up a world, Elisabeth said, when there's already a real world, There's just the world, and there's the truth about the world. You mean there's the truth, and there's the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said. No. The world exists. Stories are made up, Elisabeth said. But no less true for that, Daniel said.

This story is true and happened once in the future long ago.

All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them - much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.