Fiction Quotes

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But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace withoutgrandeur, and itself not new but derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty,--which whoso sees, may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

George Bernard Shaw

The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.

Personally, I never care for fiction or story-books. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind.

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.

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.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

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.

When I was seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt — all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction — but my big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. I've found that I'm a lot like Verne — a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo — who in a way is the flip side of Melville's madman, Ahab — goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.

Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it.

The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

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

There's a lot of crap out there. Most of the science fiction films alone are abominations, you know. They're mindless. So you can't learn from those kinds of films.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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.

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

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

G. K. Chesterton

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction — so we are told.

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.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.