Fiction Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and I think, 'Well, that's not going to happen'.

Having Colbert suggest that I was a fiction was pretty much one of the highlights of my writing career.

The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

Flannery O'Connor

One reason why money is a mystery to so many is the role of myth or fiction or convention.

Milton Friedman

Sometimes, fact mixed with fiction so thoroughly that, though no lies were told, it was hard to remember what was strictly true.

Stephenie Meyer

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

Richard Feynman

At some point, every science fiction and fantasy story must challenge the reader's experience and learning. That's much of the reason why the genre is so open to experimentation and innovation that other genres reject--strangeness is our bread and butter. Spread it thick or slice it thin, it's still our staff of life.

Orson Scott Card

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

Vladimir Nabokov

Today, we know that time travel need not be confined to myths, science fiction, Hollywood movies, or even speculation by theoretical physicists. Time travel is possible. For example, an object traveling at high speeds ages more slowly than a stationary object. This means that if you were to travel into outer space and return, moving close to light speed, you could travel thousands of years into the Earth's future.

Clifford A. Pickover

On an average day, we allow ourselves the fiction that we own a piece of our workplace. That's part of what it takes to get the job done. Deeper down, we know it's all on loan.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.

I've been haunting bookshops and hiding behind display signs of TV chefs (Nigella is excellent to hide behind as she has a huge arse) as I spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone's tempted by my sweet bait. I've also been counting how many copies of the book are left in shops, and I've been covering other upcoming authors' books with mine.

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

Charlaine Harris

If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I hadn't read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.

The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery—a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification,

Marilynne Robinson

This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.

Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.

Strange reading? It is meant to be. The world is full of romantic, macabre, improbable things which would never do in works of fiction. When those that come within one man's notice are gathered together in a scrapbook, they tell of a world which sobersided folk may not choose to recognize as their own. But it is their own; I have the evidence.

Robertson Davies