Quotes About Fiction

Having already worked in publishing for a number of years, I was not naive when I entered the submission fray. I knew I would have only one chance to submit my fiction to my agent, and that she would have only one chance to submit it to publishers. So I held on to it, revising and polishing obsessively over twenty-three drafts before I shared it with my agent.

Hard science fiction. Mind-blowing, breathtaking, hard science fiction.

Growing up," he said, "my favorite author was Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer. Have any of you ever read the short story The Last Answer?" There

Thanks for reading MIND'S EYE! I hope that you enjoyed it. If so, Nick Hall will return in BRAINWEB, available in February of 2015. When

Horror is not a genre, it is an emotion. It is a progressive form of fiction, one that evolves to meet the fears and anxieties of its times.

The problem is that horror is not a genre, it is an emotion. Horror is not a kind of fiction. It's a progressive form of fiction that continually evolves to meet the fears and anxieties of its times.

The Bible had at best become like the work of Ovid or Homer: containing great truth, but not itself true.

having to sort of pretend – collectively – that it is in fact true.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies we do.

Equality may be a fiction but nonetheless one must accept it as a governing principle.

All of my stories are true, and some of them actually happened.

Stop telling such outlandish tales. Stop turning minnows into whales.

One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else's imaginary friends, at all hours of the night.

Reality had a habit of pulling coincidences no one would accept in fiction

Man is primarily a delusional and a deceitful species. He fabricates, alters, invents, and puts forth as fact what is frequently applied only to fiction.

There is really no such thing as the novel," observes novelist Vincent McHugh. "The novel is always a novel—the specific problem, the particular case, the concrete instance.

The preceding chapter tells you how to communicate with your readers. With words. What should you as a fiction writer communicate? Feelings.

It is always the writer's world that we enter in art—never the objective world.)

Life is like a B-picture script.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.