Fiction Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.

Isaac D'Israeli

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

The letter of application... should be a masterpiece of fiction, papering over all the cracks. Get it properly typed on decent writing paper. Never let it run over the page, people get bored with reading.

Fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain.

Fiction is made of life/ Of earth and clay/ Of tears and laughter/ Of blood and sweat/ Hear them, the works of an author or a painter/ The singer and the clown/ Preserve the mystery of life.

Kuruvilla Pandikattu

The corporation is not a person; it is a legal fiction backed up by guns and police and jail cells and taxing authorities and the regulators called government.

In the press, my sex life was something else again. I was Lady Bountiful of the Sheets. Some of the best fiction of the Sixties was written about my amorous adventures with an assortment of lovers who could have only been chosen by a berserk random sampler.

The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

Clifton Fadiman

When one studies the properties of atoms one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction.

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

What the hell is Dianetics and Scientology? It's a religion. A religion of self. It's one man's religion. One man's labyrinth. A trip of L. Ron Hubbard's. A trip he lays on everyone else as 'the trip,' their trip, your trip. A science fiction story he wrote and forced into reality within the heads of others by the will of L. Ron Hubbard. The self-created fantasy of one man brought to deadly reality for others by a simple word: agreement.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

Jonathan Franzen

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

David Foster Wallace

The habits of insects are very mines of interesting knowledge, and it is impossible carefully to watch the proceedings of any insect, however insignificant, without feeling that no writer of fiction ever invented a drama of such absorbing interest as is acted daily before our eyes, though to indifferent spectators.

John George Wood

I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.

Jeanette Winterson

Above all, most Irish nationalists entertain the fiction of Irish exceptionalism, the false conviction that Ireland suffered more under British colonialism than any other comparable people. Let me be clear. I am not saying something nasty did not happen in the historical woodshed. What I am saying is that what happened was neither as nasty as we believe, nor did it last as long as we believe, nor was it all the work of some beastly British soldier passing by.

Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.

It is not as though "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" was a precept from which splendid fiction could not be drawn; it is rather that what these small-time rebels choose to do is so trivial, so cheap, and in the end, so dreary.

Robertson Davies

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million…but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?