Quotes About Fiction

We live in the world we made up.

I'm a firm believer that in-depth subjects can be better handled in a fantasy setting. ... Let's face it, traveling to some far off land is a terrific way to break the mold, to do something different. Isn't that why we go on vacations?

More than nonfiction, fiction forces us to concentrate in order to find meaning, and therefore deepens our engagement and helps comprehension.

Fiction, when it's done right, does in the daylight what dreams do at night: we leave the confines of our own experiences and go to common ground, where for a time we are not alone Where we don't have to ask how it feels, because we feel it for ourselves." 

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jincy Willett)

Arithmetic is the death of story.

Fiction, when it's done right, does in the daylight what dreams do at night: we leave the confines of our own experiences and go to common ground, where for a time we are not alone.

According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is.

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.

I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF.

In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character. In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world.

People tell you to write what you know, but I've found that writing what you know is much harder than making it up.

what's real within the story is real within the story

Fiction's nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify.

People tell you to write what you know, but I've found that writing what you know is much harder than making it up. It's easier to research a historical period than your own life, and it's much easier to deal with things that have a little less emotional weight and where you have a little more detachment. It's terrible advice!

E assim se passaram pelo menos seis ou seis anos e meio, direitinho deste jeito, sem tirar e nem pôr, sem mentira nenhuma, porque esta aqui é uma estória inventada, e não é um caso acontecido, não senhor.

Então conto-lhes um par de histórias, que é de mentiras e patranhas que se faz a narração da guerra.

Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it.

Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress.

Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Explicar las cosas tal y como han sucedido es lo más aburrido del mundo. Debería de estar prohibido. Yo invento las historias por pura cortesía.

You've been watching Sons of Anarchy, haven't you?" Pic asked, sighing heavily. Cody swallowed, then nodded. "Fucking show. Whole damned world thinks they're Jax Teller.