Quotes About Fiction

I think teaching keeps me honest because if I'm up in front of a class talking about what I think is important about fiction while knowing I myself have just failed to do that hours earlier at my computer - it's a good and humbling reminder.

Maybe I'll work for a label someday, write some fiction, nonfiction. Someday I'd like to go back to school and get my teaching degree. I want to be a grandpa. I want to have more kids.

I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.

The claim made by Team Obama that every dollar in stimulus translates into a dollar-and-a-half in growth is economic fiction. The costs of stimulus reduce future growth. No country has ever spent itself to prosperity. The price of stimulus has to be paid sometime.

There is no man in the dream.

What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in - fully understand - the inward world of another person.

I past another telkhine, who was so startled he dropped his Lil' Demons lunch box. I left him alive - partly because he had a cool lunch box...

Science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book… and destroyed it, in a thousand years' time, that wouldn't come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book, and every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they'd all be back, because all the same tests would [produce] the same result.

I like to imagine that Adam's tongue, his palate and his lips were always on fire, that the air he breathed was kindled to incandescence each time he cried out in sorrow or delight. If fiction can be said to have a function, it is to release that primary fury of which language, even now, is miraculously capable - from the dry mud of daily use. So that furred, spotted and striped, it may - as it did in Eden - scrawl under every tree as revelation.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

Stories don't have points. They're lies for keeping the truth in. They're sort of rounded, not pointy at all.

Pooh hater,' I muttered under my breath. 'Winnie-the-Pooh was not a koala--why am I even arguing about this with you?

Dreams, Mrs. Sawyer, are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses the support of dreams, life dissolves.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

Before marriage a woman may procure some éclat by pretending to believe in the fiction of her ascendancy; but after marriage, the worshipped beauty becomes a very plain every-day sort of person, and the poetry of the sex's power is at an end for ever!

What is imagination? I don't believe in fiction. In my mind everything comes from a part of who a writer is.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence on memory that shows memories are constructed by all of us and that the construction is a mixture of fact and fiction. Something similar is true for perception. Our perceptions are constructions that are a mixture of sense data processed by the brain and other data that the brain supplies to fill in the blanks.

Of course, the idea that a state, any more than a corporation, commits crimes, is a fiction. Crimes always are committed only by persons. While it is quite proper to employ the fiction of responsibility of a state or corporation for the purpose of imposing a collective liability, it is quite intolerable to let such a legalism become the basis of personal immunity.

Egwene didn't notice someone new entering the tent. Rand did, however, and he spun as the flaps parted and let in light. He frowned at the interloper. His frown died as soon as he saw the person who entered. Moiraine.

Heroes in the stories never had to sleep in haystacks, or under hedges. But it was not easy to pretend, anymore, that he was a hero in a story.

Leaders in stories never had to put up with this sort of thing.

It would be easier if this was a story, he thought. In

most of the Trollocs had moved off the Heights to attack below.

They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.