Quotes About Fiction

It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life.

Sometimes I think that maybe we are just stories.

Manatees are real, mermaids aren't. Rhinoceroses exist and sea monsters don't. There are no more sea serpents guarding deadly whirlpools. There are pirates, yes, but there is nothing romantic about them. The rest is all stories, and stories have been put in their place.

I Love Jodi anderson and all of her books!

Something occurs to me. "Have you ever tried writing something from Astrid's point of view?

She also knew that the story you made up in your mind was rarely the real story.

to the enjoyments of a writer of romance, conscious of inventive power. If in the mere perusal of novels we lose our painful sense of the realities of "this unimaginable world," and delightedly participate in the sorrows, the joys, and the struggles of the persons, how far more intensely must an authoress like Mrs. Radcliffe feel that outgoing of the heart, by which individuality is multiplied, and we seem to pass a hundred lives!

Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. 'Where does our story take place, and when?' asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. 'It's the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vous plaira. As you please.

She'd begun her story to divert him from his nightmare. Little did she know that what she described created its own nightmares.

had read so many paper-backs she was having trouble working out what was real life and what was fiction.

A family mission statement formed in my head: 'We're a family that tells tall tales to add a little magic to our realism.

The more we deviate from those safe confines [of genre fiction], the more dangerous the story starts to feel, the less safe it is. Sometimes, it veers all the way into the super jaggedy realm of literature, which is really scary and often not escapist and intended to grind your face in the machete of reality.

Everything I had read in the fields of fiction and science led me to a single, dark conclusion. Humans are screwed, and so is our planet.

What did you do to Zuulaman ?" "Zuulaman ? That's a word without meaning." "It's a place, as you very well know." Saetan shook his head. "It doesn't exist.

M: Fantasy just makes me hungrier.

The best fiction is often how we interpret our own lives and what we see as our common due. It is created usually as a means of avoiding reality which, if seriously considered, might negate our ability to strive for what might seem impossible.

Truth and fiction are tangled together in everything human beings do and in every story they tell. Whenever a book claims to be telling the truth, it is wise (as Noah's mother says at one point) to keep asking questions.

But if one is going to create characters, I suggest that one is well-advised not to attach to them the names of real persons, living or dead.

Transformational Fiction teaches how to assess, understand, and heal sexuality.

It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I'm joining the circus. Although I'm happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.

At this very moment, out in the streets, the open spaces, on the metro, in lecture halls, and inside millions of heads, millions of novels are being written chapter by chapter, erased and revised, and all of them die as a result of becoming, or not becoming reality.

Individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.

My brother is a scientist. He's a professor at MIT. He brought science fiction into my world.