Fiction Quotes
-
Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.
David Malouf
-
It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.
Eudora Welty
-
One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.
Raymond Queneau
-
Time is, as you are probably aware, merely a convenient fiction. There is no such thing as time.
E. Nesbit
-
Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.
Ray Kurzweil
-
Life, my dear Watson, is infinitely stranger than fiction; stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not conceive the things that are merely commonplace to existence. If we could hover over this great city, remove the roofs, and peep in at the things going on, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions flat, stale and unprofitable.
Arthur Conan Doyle
-
There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech.
Flannery O'Connor
-
I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.
Edwidge Danticat
-
Sometimes strange fiction, becomes grim reality.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
-
Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?
Eudora Welty
-
You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.
Paul Auster
-
In early drafts, one of the trickiest things for me to do was to realize that the techniques and devices that make readable and compelling nonfiction are not always identical to the ones that make good fiction.
Kathleen Rooney
