Fiction Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Isaac Asimov

Stephen King

Virginia Woolf

C. J. Cherryh

John Updike

Theodore Sturgeon

Jerzy Kosiński

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.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

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

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

For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.

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

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.

Theodore Sturgeon

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers. I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that.

Sheri S. Tepper

The ideal mother, like the ideal marriage, is a fiction.

Milton Sapirstein

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

George Saintsbury

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Ursula K. Le Guin

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — 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.

And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.

Jerzy Kosiński

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

Flannery O'Connor

Biography is a very definite region, bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

Philip Guedalla

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

Alfred de Vigny

Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

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

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

Writing fiction is … an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

Rose Wilder Lane

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

Louis Auchincloss