Quotes About Fiction

All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.

We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood -- between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural.

Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he or she probably can't characterize aliens well either.

It's kind of strange- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.

I know there are a lot of readers that think I've got a very crappy marriage just because of the things going on with Rick and Lori but there's really nothing that's been like a mirror. I'm just making this stuff up.

Sometimes the imagination could be even crueler than the bone saw.

I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.

ROBERT MASELLO is the author of many previous works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novels Blood and Ice and The Medusa Amulet. A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing under the novelists Robert Stone and Geoffrey Wolff at Princeton, and has since taught and lectured at many leading universities. For six years, he was the visiting lecturer in literature at Claremont McKenna College. He now lives and works in Santa Monica,

The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: "But it actually happened." Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

As Aristotle tells us: "For the purposes of [story] a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

A STORY must obey its own internal laws of probability.

intimate or epic the setting, instinctively the audience draws a circle around the characters and their world, a circumference of experience that's defined by the nature of the fictional reality. This line may reach inward to the soul, outward into the universe, or in both directions at once. The audience, therefore, expects the storyteller to be an artist of vision who can take his story to those distant depths and ranges.

live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality.

The 'I' that we confidently broadcast to the world is a fiction—a jerry-built container for the volatile unconscious elements that divide and confound us. In this sense, personal history and public history share the same dynamic principle: both are fables agreed upon. – John Lahr

Is it our calling to understand each other, or are we not, rather, called upon to misjudge one another, to prevent there being a surfeit of happiness and to ensure that happiness continues to be valued, and that these circumstances result in novels, which could not possibly exist if we all knew each other for what we are

I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part , a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?

I'd always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be living fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice.

History is filled with fictional people.

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary--made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to. I think I'll stick with reality, I said, handing Cassidy back her phone. She stared at it, and then me, disappointed. I'd think you of all people would want to escape. Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners.

Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.

The consolation of an imaginary thing is still a real consolation.