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Fiction Quotes
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Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.
John Hodgman
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You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.
That's it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.
Wallace Stevens
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Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
Neil Gaiman
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The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.
Percy Lubbock
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I'm of the opinion that science fiction writers suck at predicting the future. We mostly go around describing the present in futuristic clothes - (such as) Mary Shelley, Bill Gibson, and many others.
Cory Doctorow
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The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room masturbating and making money.
Chuck Palahniuk
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When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.
Samuel Laman Blanchard
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Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.
Fay Weldon
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The House of Fantasy is built of stone and wood and furnished in High Medieval. Its people travel by horse and galley, fight with sword and spell and battle-axe, communicate by palantir or raven, and break bread with elves and dragons.
The House of Science Fiction is built of duralloy and plastic and furnished in Faux Future. Its people travel by starship and aircar, fight with nukes and tailored germs, communicate by ansible and laser, and break protein bars with aliens.
The House of Horror is built of bone and cobwebs and furnished in Ghastly Gothick. Its people travel only by night, fight with anything that will kill messily, communicate in screams and shrieks and gibbers, and sip blood with vampires and werewolves.
George R. R. Martin
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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction — as if one were obliged to choose between them.
Susan Sontag
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Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of America so much as the iconic capital of this century. It is grand and grandiose with its two rivers acting as a border to contain the restless. Its skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are a gift for photographic consumption, but for the fictional imagination the city's inchoate density is a special challenge.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?
Jodi Picoult
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Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest.
John Gray
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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
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Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.
Muriel Spark
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I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction.
Peter Benchley
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Pretend that you are a writer of fiction, and you create a character. This character is so independent, alive and real, that it in turn forms other characters — and each writes its own book, or forms its own reality. That is a truer picture of your position.
Jane Roberts
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison
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Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.
Kim Young-ha
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Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction
David Mitchell
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Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction. We know what it is to explore the limits of what we consider to be a human being, but if we were to transform our understanding of ourselves, if we were to transform what we knew a human being to be, new possibilities of expression would open. We could function in a more creative way. In a more humane way. In the past we were transformed by the thrust of evolution or by accidental forces. This time we should transform ourselves with a conscious, committed degree of self-awareness.
Werner Erhard
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There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions — is he tall, is he short? — he had better quit.
Rex Stout
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For me [fiction] is a manner of philosophizing... Philosophy may be only a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am almost tempted to say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist... I would certainly exchange any of the works of Whitehead or Wittgenstein for the novels they ought to have written.
Colin Wilson
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A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.
Thomas M. Disch
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
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