Quotes About Fiction

Characters are supposed to have understandable motivations. The reader is supposed to be able to relate to them.

Most stories, especially difficult ones, are a mix of truth and lies.

God creates history, while people create an epic or a drama, drawn either from God's history or from unreality and pure fiction.

Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

Koshy Saar's response is indignant. "It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.

It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

novels, the great lies that tell the truth, the world in its most heroic and salacious forms can always

Big Ammachi wants Philipose to ask Koshy Saar if this Moby-Dick isn't all made up. "It's entertaining. But isn't it one big lie? Ask him." Koshy Saar's response is indignant. "It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

Aduro himself had told them so.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist.

Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die.

literature is a fiction that tells a deeper truth

the reports of which were so harrowing—forced abortions, amputations, communal executions—that I invented the blood harvesting as a less savage stand-in

Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we've seen can't be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.

I keep trying to get Matt here to cross back over into fiction, but he insists on slumming it in the theatre like some sort of third-class peasant.

A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying.

A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fianc'e; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying.

Laws banning the importation and interstate transfer of slaves contributed to the evolution of proslavery doctrine by drawing a line between slave trading and slaveholding. That line originated as a useful fiction written by planters in the upper South during the revolutionary era.

Alas, a fiction can fly around the world before the truth has managed to pick the sleep from its eyes in the morning. Many

Why let the facts get in the way of a good story? Especially when it's got a sexy headline.

Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz

Inspiration as the primary source of artistic creativity is no more than an attractive fiction, for spontaneity plays as relatively minor a role in art as it does in philosophical and scientific thinking.

The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.