Fiction Quotes

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'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.

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

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

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

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.

The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes.

Thomas Jefferson

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

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

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

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.

Eyes Tell Stories But do they know how to craft fiction? Do they know how to spin lies? His eyes swear forever, flatter with vows of only me. But are they empty promises? I stare into his eyes, as into a crystal ball, but I cannot find forever, only movies of yesterday, a sketchbook of today, dreams of a shared tomorrow. His eyes whisper secrets. But are they truths or fairy tales? I wonder if even he knows.

I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and I think, 'Well, that's not going to happen'.

You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony.... A lot of good fiction is sentimental.... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up.... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.

John Kenneth Galbraith

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.