Fiction Quotes

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

What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.

It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction... Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

John Dos Passos

Fiction allows for moral questioning, but through the back door. Personally, I like books that make you think - books you're still wondering about three days after you finish them; books you hand to a friend and say "Read this, so we can talk about it."

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.

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.

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

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.

Flannery O'Connor

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.

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.

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.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Truth is only stranger than fiction if you're a stranger to the truth. Which means you're either a liar or you're fictional.

Pseudonymous Bosch

Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs—religious, political and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation.

Pauline Hopkins

Every autobiography…becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

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

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.

I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction.

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.

A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.

Orson Scott Card

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

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.