Fiction Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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 don't care what the science fiction trade technicians say, either. They are furious that I get away with murder. I use a scientific idea as a platform to leap into the air and never come back. This keeps them angry at me. They still begrudge my putting an atmosphere on Mars in The Martian Chronicles more than 40 years ago.

I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it's really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us.

When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before —met him on the river.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

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

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

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.

If one wished to be perfectly sincere, one would have to admit there are two kinds of love — well-fed and ill-fed. The rest is pure fiction.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

G. K. Chesterton

The way to teach in this world is to pretend you're not teaching. Science fiction offers the chance to pretend to look the other way while teaching. Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.

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

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

'The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad.