Fiction Quotes

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There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.

Charles Dickens

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

Ernest Hemingway

I hate things all fiction…there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are.

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

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.

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

If, then, one should try to sum up the character of women's fiction at the present moment, one would say that it is courageous; it is sincere; it keeps closely to what women feel. It is not bitter. It does not insist upon its femininity.

Listen, you can't turn really bright people into robots. You can turn dumb people into robots, but that's true in every society and system. I don't know what to do with dumb people, but we must try to educate them along with the sharp kids. You teach a kid to read and write by the second grade, and the rest will take care of itself. To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root — first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you've got the future secured.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

G. K. Chesterton

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

Theodore Roosevelt

Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can't explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. … If I'd found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I'd have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I'm glad Kurt Vonnegut didn't like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn't see the world the way I see it. I suppose I'm too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past — a combination of both. But I don't think I'm too overoptimistic.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.

Edgar Allan Poe

Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life's a fiction and the world's a lie, so put on some Creedence and let's get high.

Science fiction writers thought it would be possible. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and other authors found ways to get people to the moon. But none of those writers foresaw any possibility of the lunar explorers being able to communicate with Earth, transmit data, position information, or transmit moving pictures of what they saw back to Earth. The authors foresaw my part of the adventure, but your part was beyond their comprehension.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.

The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

Most of them are plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonalds.

Truth is stranger than fiction — to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?