Quotes about fiction

A collection of quotes on the topic of fiction, science, likeness, doing.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón quote: “Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”

Quotes about fiction

“Suddenly, as the sun rose, the poem flew without an owner, while he faded away like a fiction called a “story.””

José Baroja book Un hijo de perra y otros cuentos

“Contrary to what some might believe, writing does not generate enjoyment or pleasure in itself, quite the opposite; And yet, I feel the need to write fiction as if I have a feeling that I will find something in the middle of my narrative journey, no matter how painful it may be.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: Klairet Levy, R. Interview to José Baroja. http://letras.mysite.com/jbar050923.html

Pain, Pleasure, Feeling

“I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!”

Homér Ancient Greek epic poet, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey

Lie

“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

People, Truth, Literature, Study

“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Life, Truth

“The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.”

Todd Strasser (1950) American author of young-adult and middle grade novels

Reading

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i. e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i. e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Part 3, Ch. 13, § 3. Source: On the subject the ideal subjects for a totalitarian authority. Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times https://web.archive.org/web/20191001213756/https://scroll.in/article/856549/ten-things-hannah-arendt-said-that-are-eerily-relevant-in-todays-political-times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original https://scroll.in/article/856549/ten-things-hannah-arendt-said-that-are-eerily-relevant-in-todays-political-times on October 1, 2019.

People, Reality, Falseness

“I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every pimple, every character flaw. I was naked for a day; you will be naked for eternity.”

Geoffrey Chaucer book The Canterbury Tales

Source: The Canterbury Tales

“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)
Context: We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Truth, Lie

“General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

People, Way, Problem, Science

“Fiction is empathy technology.”

Steven Pinker (1954) psychologist, linguist, author

“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

History, Tear

“You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Response to a question from the audience during a meeting of the Eastern Science Fiction Association on (7 November 1948), as quoted in a 1994 affidavit by Sam Moskowitz. This statement is similar or identical to several statements http://www.bible.ca/scientology-1million-start-a-religion.htm Hubbard is reported to have made to various individuals or groups in the 1940s. Variants include: The incident is stamped indelibly in my mind because of one statement that Ron Hubbard made. What led him to say what he did I can't recall — but in so many words Hubbard said: "I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is!" L. Ron Hubbard to Lloyd A. Eshbach, in 1949; as quoted by Eshbach in his autobiography Over My Shoulder: Reflections On A Science Fiction Era (1983) ISBN 1-880418-11-8 . Y'know, we're all wasting our time writing this hack science fiction! You wanta make real money, you gotta start a religion! As reported to Mike Jittlov by Theodore Sturgeon as a statement Hubbard made while at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society clubhouse in the 1940s. Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion. As quoted in the Los Angeles Times (27 August 1978) Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion. As quoted in the article "Scientology: Anatomy of a Frightening Cult" by Eugene H. Methvin. Reader's Digest (May 1980). I always knew he was exceedingly anxious to hit big money — he used to say he thought the best way to do it would be to start a cult. Sam Merwin, Editor of Thrilling Science Fiction magazine Winter of 1946-47; quoted in Bare-Faced Messiah, The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (1987) by Russell Miller Whenever he was talking about being hard up he often used to say that he thought the easiest way to make money would be to start a religion. Neison Himmel, briefly a roommate of Hubbard in Pasadena during the fall of 1945, in a 1986 interview, quoted in Bare-Faced Messiah, The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (1987) by Russell Miller.

Religion, Science

“fiction always surpasses reality but reality is always richer than fiction.”

Javier Cercas (1962) Spanish writer, journalist and professor of Spanish literature

Source: Outlaws

Reality

“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.”

Adam Levine (1979) singer, songwriter, actor, and record producer from the United States

Source: The Instructions

Truth, Way

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 1, p. 4

Money

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Truth, Lie

“People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

People, Truth

“In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

As quoted in Hitchcock (revised edition 1984) by François Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott, p. 102.

Life, God

“The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, "Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem." If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Testimony before Congress (21 March 2007), as quoted in "Gore Implores Congress To Save The Planet" at CBS Evening News (21 March 2007) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/21/politics/main2591104.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_2591104

Problem, Science, Reading, Baby

“Christianity… is an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it. Attributed in "The West and the Rest", by Niall Ferguson, Penguin 2011”

Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) king of Prussia

Kindle edition
Attributed

Imagination

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind”

J. G. Ballard book Crash

mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
"Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Crash (1973)

World

“Look, I'm a coach, I'm not Harry Potter. He is magical, but in reality there is no magic. Magic is fiction and football is real. ”

José Mourinho (1963) Portuguese association football player and manager

Reality, Football

“The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

William Gibson book Pattern Recognition

Source: Pattern Recognition

Imagination, Sense, Past, Future

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, pp. 43-44
Context: Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Life

“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"My Own View" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978) edited by Robert Holdstock; later published in Asimov on Science Fiction (1981)
General sources

Science

“The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Truth, Way, Thinking, Personality

“A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Music, Feeling, Mood

“It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.”

David Mamet (1947) American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and film director

Lie

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”

Stephen King book Joyland

Source: Joyland

Past

“The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Hell

“In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Books, World, Dreams

“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

New York Times (July 28, 1976).

Life, Chance

“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

"The Imagination of Disaster" from Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 212
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

Art, Science

“A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

For women

“I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Books, Study, Reading

“The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Reality

“It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.”

Nancy Thayer (1943) American novelist

Life

“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly

The State in Journal des débats (1848) par. 5.20.
Variant: The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.

“I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Pleasure, Beauty, Soul, Imagination

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

An Interview by Larry McCaffery
Essays
Variant: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

“Humanity lives in its fiction.”

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) French writer of Swiss origin

“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”

V.S. Naipaul A Bend in the River

Source: A Bend in the River

“[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Way, Science

“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

Women, Problem

“Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Love

“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer

History, Science, Reading

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

Source: Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

Truth

“Death is a fiction created by people who live their lives in total unawareness. There is only life, life and life alone, moving from one dimension to another, another dimension to another.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Life and Death in One Breath

Life, Death, People

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
Misquoted as "Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." by Laurence J. Peter in "Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time", among many others.
Following the Equator (1897)
Source: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Truth

“Here's a quick rule of thumb: Don't annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they'll do to you.”

John Scalzi (1969) American science fiction writer

People, Thinking, Science

“There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Life, Suffering

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Miss Prism, Act II
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Truth

“How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?”

Douglas Adams book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Source: Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #2)

Past

“I am staunchly opposed to presenting political opinions in mainstream comics. No manifestos from Spider-Man. The reader should be able to project themselves on these characters. That’s necessary when writing heroic escapist fiction. Superheroes are wish fulfillment characters. We want to be Superman. We hope we’re as principled as Captain America. It’s important that these characters portray only the most universal values.”

Chuck Dixon (1954) American comic book writer

TBU Exclusive: Chuck Dixon Talks The Batman Universe http://thebatmanuniverse.net/chuck-dixon/ (May 24, 2016)

Hope, Universe

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Rock My Soul (2003)

Education

“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.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to J. Vernon Shea (7 August 1931), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 579
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life

“Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Pain, Universe

“The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day”

Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) Uruguayan writer

Galeano (1973) Vagamundo , p. 112

Law, Coffee, Science

“No more fiction for us: we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec. 624, as translated by Tobias Dantzig in Number, the Language of Science. Fourth edition, New York: Doubleday 1954, p 141. See discussion of this entry for details.
The Will to Power (1888)

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, People, Youth, Age

“They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me that these are a fiction from first to last. O Reason, thou (alone) speakest the truth. Then perish the fools who forged the (religious) traditions or interpreted them!”

Al-Maʿarri (973–1057) Medieval Arab philosopher

As quoted in "The Meditations of Al-Maʿarri", Studies in Islamic Poetry (1921) by R. A. Nicholson, Verse 129, p. 110

Truth, Books, Fools

“I love reading books. In fact I have so many books at home that my mom has asked me not to purchase anymore. I feel books give a lot of knowledge and allow us to think from different perspectives. My all time favourite books are What I Know For Sure by Oprah Winfrey and The Power of your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy. I like to read from fiction to philosophical all of them. The last book I finished reading was Adultery by Paulo Coelho.”

Sukirti Kandpal (1987) Indian actress

Sukirti Kandpal on #WorldBookDay http://www.tellychakkar.com/tv/features/worldbookday-tv-celebs-and-their-love-reading-150423/

Love, Books, Feeling, Home

“I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if one keeps the smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read. In practice, it would be too difficult to re-build a macroscopic object like an encyclopedia that fell inside a black hole from information in the radiation, but the information preserving result is important for microscopic processes involving virtual black holes.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

"Information Loss in Black Holes" http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171 (July 2005)

Disappointment, Travel, Universe, Science

“When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life. I know that these natural phenomena are more important & significant than the special & tenuous moods which so absorb me, & that an art based on them is greater than any which fantasy could evoke—but I'm simply not big enough to react to them in the sensitive way necessary for artistic response & literary use. God in heaven! I'd certainly be glad enough to be a Shakespeare or Balzac or Turgeniev if I could!... I respect realism more than any other form of art—but must reluctantly concede that, through my own limitations, it does not form a medium which I can adequately use.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffman Price (29 September 1933), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 579
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

Life, God, Art, Way

“In either case the orator should bear clearly in mind throughout his whole speech what the fiction is to which he has committed himself, since we are apt to forget our falsehoods, and there is no doubt about the truth of the proverb that a liar should have a good memory.”
Vtrubique autem orator meminisse debebit actione tota quid finxerit, quoniam solent excidere quae falsa sunt: verumque est illud quod vulgo dicitur, mendacem memorem esse oportere.

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Book IV, Chapter II, 91; translation by H. E. Butler
Compare: "Liars ought to have good memories", Algernon Sidney, Discourses on Government, chapter ii, section xv.
Alternate translation for "solent excidere quae falsa sunt": False things tend to be forgotten
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

Truth, Memory, Forgetting

“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.”

Cao Xueqin book Dream of the Red Chamber

Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia,
Wu wei you chu you huan wu.
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5

Truth

“There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality.”

Steven Spielberg (1946) American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur

The Making of Jurassic Park

Science

“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

"Science Fiction"; originally published in The New York Times Book Review, 5 September 1965
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974)

Science

“Totalitarianism no longer comes in the form of communism or fascism. It comes now from corporations. And these corporations fear those who think and write, those who speak out and form relationships freely. Individual freedom impedes their power and their profits. Our democracy, as Snowden I think has revealed, has become a fiction. The state, through elaborate forms of political theater, seeks to maintain this fiction to keep us passive. And if we wake up, the state will not shy away from draconian measures. The goal is complete subjugation, the iron rule of our corporations and our power elite.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Source: “ 25:13 Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

Fear, Democracy, Communication, Thinking

“If, then, one should try to sum up the character of women's fiction at the present moment, one would say that it is courageous; it is sincere; it keeps closely to what women feel. It is not bitter. It does not insist upon its femininity.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

"Women and Fiction"
Granite and Rainbow (1958)

Women, Feeling, Courage, Sincerity

“As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Bagombo Snuff Box

Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)

Angels, Change, Personality, Dead

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Hugging the Shore, foreword (1983)

Sea

“Eleanor: It is a pretty fiction that mothers love each child in equal measure… a fiction, no more than that. There is always a favorite. With me, it was Richard. With Henry, it was you.
John: No. I was not his favorite. It was rather that I was the only son he had left. Have you forgotten? My brothers sided with you.”

Sharon Kay Penman book Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons (1985), Book 1

Love

“Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don’t misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 258)
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Idea, Problem, Thinking, Winter

“Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Original: (fr) Notre révolution m'a fait sentir tout le sens de l'axiome qui dit que l'histoire est un roman ; et je suis convaincu que la fortune et l'intrigue ont fait plus de héros, que le génie et la vertu. Source: Lettres à ses commettants, 1ère série, n°10 http://www.royet.org/nea1789-1794/archives/journaux/lettres_commettants/robespierre_lettres_commettants_1_10.htm, (21 December 1792)

Feeling, Chance, History

“We cannot suppose that an individual’s thinking survives bodily death, since that destroys the organization of the brain and dissipates the energy which utilized the brain tracks. God and immortality, the central dogma of the Christian religion, find no support in science. But we in the West have come to think of them as the irreducible minimum of theology. No doubt people will continue to entertain these beliefs, because they are pleasant, just as it is pleasant to think ourselves virtuous and our enemies wicked. But for my part I cannot see any grounds for either. I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist, so might the Gods of Olympus, Ancient Egypt or Babylon; but no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other. They lie outside the region of provable knowledge and there is no reason to consider any of them.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1920s, What I Believe (1925)

Death, God, People, Lie

“To put it in rude, plain, unpalatable words — true patriotism, real patriotism: loyalty not to a Family and a Fiction, but a loyalty to the Nation itself!
…"Remember this, take this to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it."”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Czar Nicholas II
1905
Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1891-1910 (1992) ed. Louis J. Budd

Family, Time, Heart, Loyalty

“"What's common across all human experience across all time? That's what Jung essentially meant by an archetype. We tend to think that what we see with our senses is real. And of course that's true, but what we see with our senses is what's real that works in the time frame that we exist in. So we see things that we can touch and pick up - we see tools, essentially, that are useful for our moment to moment activities. We don't see the structures of eternity, and we especially don't see the abstract structures of eternity. We have to imagine those with our imagination. Well that's partly what those stories are doing. They're saying that there are forms of stability that transcend our capacity to observe, which is hardly surprising. We know that if we are scientists, because we are always abstracting out things that we can't immediately observe. But there are moral, or metaphysical, or phenomenological realities that have the same nature. You can't see them in your life by observing them with your senses, but you can imagine them with your imagination, and sometimes the things that you imagine with your imagination are more real than the things that you see. Numbers are like that, for example. There are endless things like that. Same with fiction. A good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power. It's distilled reality. And some would say "it never happened," but it depends on what you mean by "happened." If it's a pattern that repeats in many many places, with variation, you can abstract out the central pattern. So the pattern never purely existed in any specific form, but the fact that you pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that you've extracted something real. I think the reason that the story of Adam and Eve has been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true."”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life, Imagination, Nature, Thinking

“I shall not attempt to paint to you the feelings of this heart, nor the majestic beauty and glory which surrounded us on this occasion; but you will believe me when I say, that earth, nor men, with the eloquence of time, cannot begin to clothe language in as interesting and sublime a manner as this holy personage. No; nor has this earth power to give the joy, to bestow the peace, or comprehend the wisdom which was contained in each sentence as they were delivered by the power of the Holy Spirit! Man may deceive his fellow-men, deception may follow deception, and the children of the wicked one may have power to seduce the foolish and untaught, till naught but fiction feeds the many, and the fruit of falsehood carries in its current the giddy to the grave; but one touch with the finger of his love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all into insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind. The assurance that we were in the presence of an angel, the certainty that we heard the voice of Jesus, and the truth unsullied as it flowed from a pure personage, dictated by the will of God, is to me past description, and I shall ever look upon this expression of the Savior’s goodness with wonder and thanksgiving while I am permitted to tarry; and in those mansions where perfection dwells and sin never comes, I hope to adore in that day which shall never cease.”

Oliver Cowdery (1806–1850) American Mormon leader

Letter from Oliver Cowder to W.W. Phelps (Letter I), (September 7, 1834). Published in Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate, Vol. I. No. 1. Kirtland, Ohio, October, 1834. Published in Letters by Oliver Cowdery to W.W. Phelps on the Rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Liverpool, 1844.

Love, Wisdom, Men, God

“It lays down, as is generally known, that our speculations upon all subjects whatsoever, pass necessarily through three successive stages: a Theological stage, in which free play is given to spontaneous fictions admitting of no proof; the Metaphysical stage, characterized by the prevalence of personified abstractions or entities; lastly, the Positive stage, based upon an exact view of the real facts of the case.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

Source: A General View of Positivism (1848, 1856), p. 36

Success

“Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 85e

Understanding

“Truth is stranger than fiction — to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.”

Mark Twain book Following the Equator

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
Following the Equator (1897)

People, Truth

“Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Science

“Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune. Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Second Inaugural Address (January 2013)

Life, People

“The science fiction and manga readers had the same… Most fiction writers then had had some experience in the comic and some of it had even been absorbed completely… I can not understand why those who love science fiction also loves the manga and vice versa. There are two kinds characterized by a biting satire and at worst are called "extravagant"…. Both are aimed toward the future, and therefore contain romantic adventures for young people.”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

Since I cartoonist ; quoted in AA.VV., Osamu Tezuka: A Manga Biography , vol. 3, translated by Marta Fogato, Coconino Press, Bologna, 2001, p. 73.

Love, People, Understanding, Science

“A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

History, Sense

“The real difference, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

Interview with Weird Tales (24 May 2007) http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/2007/05/24/george-rr-martin-on-magic-vs-science/ Context: I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep. I know there are elements in the field, particularly in science fiction, who feel that the differences are very profound, but I do not agree with that analysis. I think for me it is a matter of the furnishings. An elf or an alien may in some ways fulfill the same function, as a literary trope. It’s almost a matter of flavor. The ice cream can be chocolate or it can be strawberry, but it’s still ice cream. The real difference, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction.

Parting

“It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead — I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction.”

Rajneesh (1931–1990) Godman and leader of the Rajneesh movement

God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth (1989) YouTube video of the lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBEIeRSLb8k Context: It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead — I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction. Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing! Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly — seventy years will be gone soon. Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears. But in the beginning it is bitter if all your belief systems are taken away from you. The fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia, which is there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy it, only the search for truth and the experience of truth — not a belief — is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me.

God, Truth, Understanding, Dead

“We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Modern Fiction"
The Common Reader (1925)
Context: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

Courage, Sincerity

“Leninism is warlike from head to foot. War is impossible without cunning, without subterfuge. without deception of the enemy. Victorious war cunning is a constituent element of Leninist politics. But at the same time, Leninism is supreme revolutionary honesty toward the party and the working class. It admits of no fiction, no bubble-blowing, no pseudo-grandeur.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

The New Course (1924)

War, Time, Victory

“A good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power. It's distilled reality. And some would say "it never happened," but it depends on what you mean by "happened."”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

If it's a pattern that repeats in many, many places, with variation, you can abstract out the central pattern. So the pattern never purely existed in any specific form, but the fact that you pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that you've extracted something real. I think the reason that the story of Adam and Eve has been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true.
Other

Dependency, Reality

This quote waiting for review.

“Fiction is far more accurate than History when it comes to the human being.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: https://www.mundoclasico.com/articulo/45227/entrevista-intrapersonal-confrontada-omar-jerez-con-jose-baroja

History