Quotes
Quotes about Fiction
If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.
Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!
In whose capacious all-embracing leaves
The very marrow of tradition's shown;
And all that history, much that fiction weaves.
'T is strange, but true; for truth is always strange,--
Stranger than fiction.
We know to tell many fictions like to truths, and we know, when we will, to speak what is true.
The creation of a human community in fiction is the closest the novelist can get to the creation of a cosmos
Real life, in shifting to a fictive groove, is seen as inferior to fiction
I believe Nabokov was right in saying that language itself is one of the characters of fiction
Spending half an hour or an hour, or two hours, on a piece of narrative fiction gives us the same kind of holistic, the same kind of total effect, the effect of being absorbed in an artistic experience without interruption that we get from listening to a piece of music
If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence
Fiction deals with the external world, where things are coloured, and the fiction writer has to get the colours right
When I first began to write fiction it was ... refined hobby that, as I got deeper into it, began to demand more time and application than was right for a hobby: it began to wish to be a full-time job
Writers of fiction often have difficulty in deciding between what really happened and what they imagine as having happened .. we lie for a living
I tried to address him with calm, to treat him as an errant character of my own fiction
I tried to address him with calm, to treat him as some errant character of my own fiction
Ernest Hemingway ... reached a stage where, even though he had virtually ceased to produce fiction, he was totally in thrall of its contrivances
Every fiction writer ought, once in his lifetime, to be forced to fulfil in fact what he had fashioned in fancy
Do more than write farces and sensational fiction. Construct something in which to believe. Love and beauty are not enough
I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias. It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something, too, of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better." -John Brunner, science fiction writer (1934-1995)
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
The average family exists only on paper and its average budget is a fiction, invented by statisticians for the convenience of statisticians.
When we speak of the commerce with our colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
