Quotes About Fiction

The art that speaks [truth] most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters.

Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. Humanity itself seems to matter more to the novelist than what humanity thinks it can prove. When

We have our version. We even tell ourselves convincing little fictions that it's okay to hate those other people because they're the ones who are really filled with hate. We make ourselves judges.

if nobody can contradict the story, then it's pseudoreal,

Books and movies are portals through which we escape from sour reality. They enable us to change our names, our history, our faces and our tomorrows, at least for a few hours. Most people don't realize they are traveling on magic carpets.

It is said that most first novels are at least partly autobiographical

But do you know when stories stop being stories? The moment someone begins to believe in them.

I could never resist the temptation of having a look at something that doesn't exist.

Now you're lying, Dandelion.' 'Not lying, just embellishing, and there's a difference.

But, Dandelion, I could never resist the temptation of having a look at something that doesn't exist.

Everything has been, everything has happened. And everything has already been written about.

Not lying, just embellishing, and there's a difference.

The future is fiction. It will come, of course, we hear about it all the time, but the old wisdom knows that only what is, and what was, exists. The rest does not, because no one ever saw it or touched it.

This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.

On average, everyone has read The Da Vinci Code. You have probably read it. Even if you have not read it, statistically you have.

Everybody must have a fantasy.

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Al lector se le llenaron de pronto los ojos de lágrimas, y una voz cariñosa le susurró al oído: —¿Por qué lloras, si todo en este libro es de mentira? Y él respondió: —Lo sé; pero lo que yo siento es de verdad.

Suddenly the reader's eyes were filled with tears, and a loving voice whispered in his ear: -Why are you crying if everything in that book isn't true?- And the reader replied: -I know; but what I feel is real.

People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that it is a labelling that helps librarians, and people who know the kind of thing they like and don't want their prejudices to be disturbed.

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.