Quotes About Fiction

The clothes you're wearing, the room, the house, the city that you're in. Everything in it started out in the human imagination. Your lives, your personalities, your whole world. All invented. All made up. All the wars, the romances. The masterpieces and the machines. And there's nothing here but a funny little twist of amino acids, playing a marvelous game of pretend.

Murder, other than in the most strict forensic sense, is never soluble. That dark human clot can never melt into a lucid, clear suspension. Our detective fiction tells us otherwise: everything is just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive and a means, and you have solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce the complex events.

This is an IMAGINARY STORY...aren't they all?

History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a function that we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world's insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.

Do we immerse ourselves in fictional horror as a way of numbing our emotions to it's real-life counterpart ?

Serafina of the Unveiled. Mevolent's wife.

It's in a neighbor's house fiction begins.

while Tolkien's stories were not historically real, they were true

A lie to get out of something, or take an advantage for oneself, that's one thing; but a lie to make life more interesting—well, that's entirely different.

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things that it pointed to, content to believe that at least in this version things worked for her better than they did in the one I never heard.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

Real life. The greatest interactive fiction of them all.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

It's all make believe, isn't it?

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me.

Bond was escapism, but not meant to be imitated in real life.

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.