“Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction—and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money.”
Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 9, “Committee Processes” (p. 159)
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Charles Stross 211
British science fiction writer and blogger 1964Related quotes
“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”
Source: A Bend in the River
The Library of Foresight, edition 3 of The Trilogy by John Sai, p. iii.
“We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next.”
Source: Drowning Instinct
"Fictions of Every Kind" in Books and Bookmen (February 1971)
"Inner Landscape : Interview with J.G. Ballard" by Robert Lightfoot and David Pendleton, in Friends No. 17 (30 October 1970) http://www.jgballard.ca/media/1970_oct_friends_magazine.html; also quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews
Context: A hundred years ago one has the impression that people had made a clear distinction between the outer world of work and of agriculture, commerce and social relationships — which was real — and the inner world of their own minds, day-dreams and hopes. Fiction on the one hand; reality on the other. This reality which surrounded individuals, the writer's role of inventing a fiction that encapsulated various experiences going on in the real world and dramatising them in fictional form, worked. Now the whole situation has been reversed. The exterior landscapes of the seventies are almost entirely fictional ones created by advertising, mass merchandising… politics conducted as advertising. It is very difficult for the writer.
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
“Morality and literature,” pp. 161-162
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)
Context: It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.
“Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.”
Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, p. viii.