Fiction Quotes

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Ven you read the speeches in the papers, and see as vun gen'lman says of another, 'the Honourable member, if he vill allow me to call him so' you vill understand, sir, that that means, 'if he vill allow me to keep up that 'ere pleasant and uniwersal fiction.'

Charles Dickens

Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination.

Stephen Hawking

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

William Shakespeare

The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind.

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.

The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed ? the deed is everything.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.

Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colors, don't misunderstand me, shapes and colors, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their existence.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

G. K. Chesterton

We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of successive ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction.

Charles Dickens

It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

No more fiction for us: we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a two-way trade between science fiction and science. Science fiction suggests ideas that scientists incorporate into their theories, but sometimes science turns up notions that are stranger than any science fiction.

Stephen Hawking

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Ernest Hemingway

Feelings, too, are facts. Emotion is a fact. Human experience is a fact. It is often possible to gain more real insight into human beings and their motivation by reading great fiction than by personal acquaintance.

Eleanor Roosevelt

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.

Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction … for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.

G. K. Chesterton