Quotes about fiction

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“Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.”

“you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction”

“File under "Hard Truths": the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.”

“Do not, under any circumstances belittle a works of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

“Happy endings are a luxury of fiction.”

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”

“Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.”

“The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.”

“Anna: “I thought Indians built fires with fiction.”
Charles: “I can do that, but I'd like to eat sometime in the next day or so. Sterno and Bic are much faster.”

“If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.”

“Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.”

“People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.”

“Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!”

“[She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.”

“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.”

“I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.”

“India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”

“Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.”

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”

“Tis strange - but true; for Truth is always strange,
Stranger than Fiction”

“["The Devil in the Dark"] impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction thennow, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn.”

“Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.”

“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.”

“Happily ever after?"
"If justice doesn't triumph and love doesn't make the circle in entertainment fiction, what's the point? Real life sucks too often.”

“We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.”

“Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.”

“Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.”

“There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.”

“If it's fiction, then it better be true.”

“Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.”

“It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.”

“We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next.”

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”

“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.”

“They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.”

“There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.”

“Good fiction creates its own reality.”

“If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.”

“But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”

“Calvin: History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
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“The mere suggestion of fame and fortune casts a glamour all its own. It is rather alarming how quickly people will turn someone else's fiction into fact in order to support their own fictions of themselves.”

“There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.”

“I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.”

“Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.”

“Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.”

“Science Fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy”

“Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.”

“Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.”

“Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.”

“Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.”

“Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.”

“Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot—but not twice.”

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”

“Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.”

“I can't read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.”

“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.”

“Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.”

“Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.”
Opinionis enim commenta delet dies, naturae iudicia confirmat.

“I think most people live in fiction… That's how you keep your fragile body intact.”

“Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.”

“I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen”

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

“I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.”

“What we remember is probably fiction anyway.”

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”

“I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”

“Kids, the fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.”

“Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.”

“… it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.”

“Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.”

“Fiction is an improvement on life”

“Of course, the downside of attending a fictional school is that our lacrosse team sucks.”

“The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”

“Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.”

“Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.”

“He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.”

“Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets, lies, stories. We all tell them. Sometimes, because we hope to entertain. Sometimes, because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.”

“But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction. If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own.”

“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”

“There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.”

“That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?”

“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”

“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.”

“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”

“Aren't most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women.”

“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”

“Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.”

“Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.”

“I don't care whether I really exist or don't, whether I'm real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate.”

“The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.”

“If you're going to make a science fiction movie, then have a hover craft chase, for God's sake.”

“That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?”

“The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.”

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”

“The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning.”

“I am not dangerous. Only the stories are dangerous. Only the fictions we create, especially when they become expectations.”