Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

Luck took me right out of myself - I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising but always responsible, no tricks for tricks' sake; so satisfying, with its shifting and puzzles. So much fiction turns out to be diversion, in spite of fancy claims, and doesn't really look at anything. Well - this does.

Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.

Many Americans have never owned a book. And others have never owned a non-fiction book. Providing them with a 300-page paperback would get them started, maybe. And even if it didn't, at least they'd own that one. So that's a serious problem.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

Many fiction writers who put the science in dont get it right.

Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.

Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

Many of the concepts we once thought belonged to speculation or science fiction are now part of our understood reality.

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.

Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.

Max Allan Collins blends fact and fiction like no other writer.

Maybe I have a one-track mind, but the best writers and thinkers are focusing on nonfiction these days; this is the genre where a writer can make a mark and change an aspect of the world - much more so than in fiction.

Meanwhile, however, what’s most bothersome about Pulp Fiction is its success. This is not to be mean-spirited about Tarantino himself; may he harvest all the available millions. But the way that this picture has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming.

Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage.

Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak human, not the other way around.

Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense, the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction.

Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.

More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.

Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us.

Modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988 (.....) Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times.

Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.

Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

Most contemporary fiction sucks. It's intellectually dishonest, often morally dishonest. It's cheap and easy. It pretends to be deep but is really quite shallow.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

Most fiction series are written so that the reader can come in at any point and not feel lost, but if you can start at the beginning, why not?

Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.

Most science fiction, quite frankly, is silly nonsense.

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

My fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that's different but it's familiar enough that it freaks people out a little.

My briefest ever definition of science fiction is 'Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.'

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

my experience as a fiction writer tells me that the deeper I look into myself, the more universal is the experience I find there.

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.

My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.

My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or do anything with it.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

My interest in film is sort of catholic - apart from science fiction and horror movies, I'll watch almost everything.

My mom introduced me to science-fiction.

My music is pretty honest. I can't rap on science fiction. Punk is from the street.

My non-fiction films are pretty much fiction, or at least close... It's all "movies" for me. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.

My motto is: write about anything you bloody well like; just make sure you do it effectively. We've all had all the emotions, the rest is research and that leap which some can do and others cannot - it's not really something you can learn, otherwise all academics of literature would be wonderful fiction writers.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.