Quotes About Fiction

She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.

the novel is a liberal form…and the act of fiction writing is a performance of sympathy with people you are not .

You know you'd rather read about me than experience me in person. Why pretend?

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure, and even if I did, what business would I, who feel like the sick one, have in offering it? It's hard to consider literature a medicine; sooner or later the therapeutically minded reader will end up fingering reading itself as the sickness.

Science and delusion had no ground in common.

All of a sudden I became aware of how very hungry I was to construct and inhabit an imagined world.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

Astrology fell into the class of a fake lie ...and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero's capacities were reserved for lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people needed to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, decry and destroy. (p. 65)

The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions.

Response to the question by The Atlantic: Who is the Greatest Fictional Character of All Time? God is the author of all the other characters, and of all the other authors of all the other characters, unless he doesn't exist--and said existence, in its disputation, is one of the greatest ongoing narratives in human storytelling.

She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.

They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

It's just that sometimes we make things up just to talk

I was thankful, said my father, for the make-believe.

La literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido.

He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it.

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. - The Total Library

I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths.

Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet?... these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.

Por lo demás, la literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido.