Quotes About Fiction

You look like a B-movie Dracula.' - Anita to Aubrey Guilty Pleasures

We are not going to have a zombie-versus-vampire war through the streets of Dublin, Nathaniel.

Who cares what the color means? How do you know what he meant to say? I mean, did he leave another book called Symbolism in My Books? If he didn't, then you could just be making all of this up. Does anyone really think this guy sat down and stuck all kinds of hidden meanings into his story? It's just a story.... But I think you are making all of this symbolism stuff up. I don't believe any of it.

Fiction writing starts off by requiring the towering arrogance that enables one to sit down at the typewriter in the belief that someone somewhere will actually be eager to read the productions of our own private imaginations. But that arrogance must be buffered by the humility that leads us to learn our craft and strive to make our work comprehensible and inviting and accessible to the reader.

Many of us may not know too much about our characters, but we tell the reader altogether too much.

If you are trying to write realistic fiction and you people it extensively with overdrawn characters, you're working against yourself. You can occasionally get away with filling books and stories with grotesques, but unless your name's Carson McCullers it gets tricky. A less obvious form of caricature consists of giving an otherwise ordinary character a trait or attribute or mannerism on which the reader may focus his attention.

They are properly described as works of fiction, with the understanding that fiction does not imply lack of truth so much as a willingness to refashion factuality in the service of drama, and perhaps in search of a higher truth.

The book was How to Write a Novel, by Manuel Komroff; a professor at Columbia University, he was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction. His book, published in 1950, is available from used booksellers for between $10 and $25.

thought of writing a lesbian novel. I read a great deal of lesbian fiction and nonfiction, some by Marijane Meaker under one name or another. I'm sure I read them in part out of prurient interest, but that's why I initially read John O'Hara, James T. Farrell, and no end of fine writers.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.

Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.

I did one sci-fi movie. I did 'Gattaca.' I liked 'Gattaca' because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.

I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.

The shape I'm in, I could donate my body to science fiction.

The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

The mysteriousness and mystique of space is such, that science fiction attempts to tantalize you by telling you a story that could possibly be out there and that's the appeal of science fiction.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

For me, a kitchen is like science fiction. I only go there to open the refrigerator and take something out.

It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.