Quotes About Fiction

Oh yes, I admire books. I still do. They can preserve a truth for twice a thousand years and teach it to any who has the skill and cares to read it. They can also fix a lie in stone forever. But worse still, they—the books—can be about nothing at all. Nothing real.

the number-one rule in making shit up: Make it so unbelievable that people have to believe it.

Alison Goodman

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

Inés y la alegría es una obra de ficción inserta en la crónica de un acontecimiento histórico real. Para afrontar su escritura, un formato nuevo para mí, he mantenido ciertas lealtades y me he tomado ciertas libertades.

I reach for the book on my nightstand instead. Immersed in the story of a guy and a girl so entwined, so perfectly made for each other, their love transcends time. Wishing I could climb inside those pages and live there forever, preferring their story to mine.

No. We don't have gills, and we're not mer-people. Damn, do all you people live your lives believing everyone you meet stepped out of the pages of a comic book? Please. I'd kick Aquaman's ass.

Bastaba con que, en mi cabeza, creara la ficción de destruir el billete de avión y mi tierna amistad con Rinri se transformaba en un hostil espanto.

Tout ce que l'on aime devient une fiction.

That settles it, no more books about vampire before bedtime.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

I have this horrible weakness. I fall in love with my characters. 'Suspect' started as a one-shot, but I just love Maggie so much, and I love Maggie and Scott and what they have going.

I'd probably be a super wealthy guy if I had sat around writing songs and getting them placed like everyone else I know. But I write songs about people or after I meet them and they're somewhat biographical - they're fiction but also non-fiction.

As a teenager I read a lot of books. Books with lots of scary trends, things like nuclear weapons and overpopulation and global diseases, and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to write stories that showed people these problems and that we could do something about them.'

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I've read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it's the same.

I love it when real science finds a home in a fictional setting, where you take some real core idea of science and weave it through a fictional narrative in order to bring it to life, the way stories can. That's my favorite thing.

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

Amy Rapp, my producing partner, and I are drawn to character-driven material. We're developing and producing movies and TV, fiction and non-fiction, studio and independent, broadcast and cable, theatre, and web so our slate is really diverse.

What's funny is that an old Web site of mine just had one fake bio, and everyone went crazy for it. So when I made the new Web site, I thought, 'I just need to make this one even more absurd.'

Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer's life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read and admired as autobiographical expression. And thanks to the democratic exposures of the web, it's easier than ever to document private experiences and divulge the most intimate secrets.

I made the mistake of writing something very, very short about Obama for this website that I write fiction for, and my father told me never do that again. And he was right. I have nothing to add to a political conversation because it's not my area.

I like to take fictitious characters and circumstances and wedge them into a real world.

I used the imaginary kingdom not as a sentimentalized fairyland but as an opening wedge to express what I hoped would be some very hard truths.