Fiction Quotes
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A gritty grain of truth lay at the heart of most legends, she had told me, and the slow accretion of fiction hardened in layers around it.
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Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.
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Humanity lives in its fiction.
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As for whether genre considerations influence what I write, they don't at all, but I might sell more books if they did. The Night Journal is a hodge-podge of historical fiction, western, mystery, and contemporary domestic drama. It doesn't settle into a specific market, reviewers have a hard time describing it, and sometimes it gets classified weirdly in bookstores. But from a writer's standpoint, I like that it's hard to categorize.
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The goal in blogging/ business/ inspiring non-fiction is to share a truth, or at least a truth as the writer sees it. To not just share it, but to spread it and to cause change to happen. You can do that in at least three ways: with research (your own or reporting on others), by building and describing conceptual structures, or with stories that resonate.
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If there’s a zeppelin, it’s alternate history. If there’s a rocketship, it’s science fiction. If there are swords and/or horses, it’s fantasy. A book with swords and horses in it can be turned into science fiction by adding a rocketship to the mix. If a book has a rocketship in it, the only thing that can turn it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.
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Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.
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The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.
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Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.
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Truth is stranger than fiction, which is why reality TV is so popular.
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Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.
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I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.
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As a kid I was enamored with fiction, most of it utterly forgettable and long forgotten.
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My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.
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Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.
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Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others
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I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.
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The truer the facts the better the fiction.
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As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.
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My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.
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I've written some short stories about my personal experience, but it's not something you can use everywhere. Every novel, every work of fiction, needs its own food.
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Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
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Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.
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I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.
