Fiction Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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 have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.

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

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'.

Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.

Charlaine Harris

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.

Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger.

Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.

Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification,

Marilynne Robinson

All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery—a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

I hadn't read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.

If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

Ursula K. Le Guin

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

Vladimir Nabokov

The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

Flannery O'Connor

One reason why money is a mystery to so many is the role of myth or fiction or convention.

Milton Friedman

Sometimes, fact mixed with fiction so thoroughly that, though no lies were told, it was hard to remember what was strictly true.

Stephenie Meyer

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

Richard Feynman

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

On an average day, we allow ourselves the fiction that we own a piece of our workplace. That's part of what it takes to get the job done. Deeper down, we know it's all on loan.

I've been haunting bookshops and hiding behind display signs of TV chefs (Nigella is excellent to hide behind as she has a huge arse) as I spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone's tempted by my sweet bait. I've also been counting how many copies of the book are left in shops, and I've been covering other upcoming authors' books with mine.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.