Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

We have people being a little uncomfortable in their life on Earth with finances and so on, so Science Fantasy or Science Fiction allows people to think that there are possibilities beyond the gravity of our planet.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

We live in a science fiction universe. We have done for a long time.

We live in a violent world, but since the success of films like Pulp Fiction, it seems every movie has some violence in it, and it's now being used as a form of comedy: audiences are now being encouraged to laugh when people get their heads blown off. I just don't like hearing people laugh at violence.

We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.

Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

We need more science, but what we especially need is science fiction.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

We translated the script together with them. And during the process of translation, they rewrote the scripts. They put a lot into it. They made it their own. There are names of plants or chants or certain rites and everything that you cannot come across it in a movie. You know, you cannot learn about them casually. So the film doesn't have value in the ethnographical, anthropological. It's fiction.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Whatever alleged 'truth' is proven by results to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage!

What if most of the technologies readers and cinemagoers are presented with in bestselling books and blockbuster movies are not science fiction, but science fact? What if they currently exist on the planet, but are suppressed from the masses?

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative

What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.

What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

What I love about the 'Alien' franchise is I would do all kinds of films - dramas, comedies, whatever - and every now and then I'd be in this science fiction blockbuster that would re-introduce the character and me to a lot of audiences around the world and allow me to go back and do the smaller films again, so it was really a good balance for me.

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

What is fiction or cinema if not escape?

What I'm doing is exploring things. This is why I'm a fiction writer rather than an essayist or a politician or whatever. I just gather material and find a scenario, and see where it takes me. I don't have a plan.

What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

What seems real one moment is fiction the next and gone out of existence the moment after that. Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth, and change our only constancy.

What's needed today, now, more than ever, is 'Star Peace' for there is an ominous, mutual threat to all science fiction. It's called 'Twilight'. And it is really, really bad.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.

When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn't realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

When it comes down to it, the reason that science fiction endures is that it is, at its core, an optimistic genre. What it says at the end of the day is that there is a tomorrow, we do go on, we don't extinguish ourselves and leave the planet to the cockroaches.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the "Agamemnon.

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.

When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.

When it [truth] emerges it often bears out the saying that 'truth is stranger than fiction.' A novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occur in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology .