Fiction Quotes

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What's fictional is arrangement—what follows what. If somebody is lying to you, part of what they're doing is hiding things, omitting stuff, changing the order of things. And that's fiction.

I did want to write into the future. There's a lot of science fiction that's written about the future in which they talk about how the past looks from that future. It's all discussed retrospectively. I wanted to show cause and effect.

Of her book Last Hundred Years

Modern writers of history are so far superior to fiction writers lately that the domestic psychologies we're supposed to wade through that pass for art are only high dreariness. I get much from the courage of men and women in history. History is story, of course, and good history will invest you.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical—one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Margaret Atwood

The fact that we die is one of the more interesting things that happen to us. Fiction ought to be about bottom lines, and that's as bottom-line as you can get.

Fiction tells you, by the making up of truth, what is really true.

Attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction, or else you're going to be boring.

About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be.

David Hare said that the two most depressing words in the English language are literary fiction. I couldn't agree more. But we might soon have to add that the two most depressing words in the American language are creative nonfiction.

The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The parable of the prodigal son, the most beautiful fiction that ever was invented; our Saviour's speech to His disciples, with which He closed His earthly ministrations, full of the sublimest dignity and tenderest affection, surpass everything that I ever read; and like the spirit by which they were dictated, fly directly to the heart.

Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

Wallace Stegner

[Science fiction is] that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin. It is distinguished from pure fantasy by its need to achieve verisimilitude and win the 'willing suspension of disbelief' through scientific plausibility.

If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

Fernando Pessoa

I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.

Phyllis McGinley

An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.

There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.

Vladimir Nabokov

We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury

It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

Dorothy Allison