Fiction Quotes
-
Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story.
-
Even people that were never interested in science fiction are interested in STAR TREK.
-
The purpose of fiction is to combat loneliness.
-
Some years ago, someone had come up with the idea that the State should hold all Titles to vehicles, mailing a Certificate of Title to the 'owners'. This created a legal fiction that the State owned the vehicles. Drivers were thus driving a State owned vehicle, mandating drivers must have a license to drive a State vehicle, which was false. The State reaped many millions with its drivers license scam, and began issuing heavy fines for not having a State license.
-
A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.
-
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
-
Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.
-
While fiction is often impossible, it should not be implausible.
-
Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
-
Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good.
-
I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.
-
I do love science fiction, but it's not really a genre unto itself; it always seems to merge with another genre. With the few movies I've done, I've ended up playing with genre in some way or another, so any genre that's made to mix with others is like candy to me. It allows you to use big, mythic situations to talk about ordinary things.
-
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.
-
I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.
-
Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
-
At one time in my career, Barnes and Noble bookstores categorized my books as religious fiction.
-
To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.
-
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
-
It remains a mystery to me why some of that pulp fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social literary fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.
-
Most apocalyptic fiction makes it very clear that it's the end of the world. But 'Bird Box' hasn't convinced me of that. Is 'Bird Box' instead a suburban neurotic nightmare? I don't think so. But it's fun to consider.
-
Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.
-
By all the rules of modern fiction there should have been gunsmoke mingling its acrid blue with the brown haze of corral dust. Dead men should have fallen and been trampled... Nothing of this sort happened.
-
I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
-
Fantasy deals with the immeasurable while science-fiction deals with the measurable.
