Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.

Novels are just very, very, very long lies. That is to say, you’ve got to get your story straight!

Not tingling as much as a rapid-burning desire and longing. I want him to f**k me. Right here. Right now.

Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend.

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading. - The Novel as Research. (1968)

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

Now I think I understand how this world can overcome a man.

..now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

Nuestra misión consistía en tratar de rescatar a nuestros pacientes del mundo exclusivo, propio, aislado de los demás, en el cual verdaderamente existían, para colocarlos de nuevo en éste, no sé si más o menos ficticio, pero sin duda alguna positivamente peor que los que muchos de ellos poseían, propiedad privada, para desenvolver su existencia mental.

…Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I’m deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of the New Age about it—not because of the practices themselves, which as far as I can tell from a safe distance may well have a lot to them, but because of the people who get involved who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who’s just discovered Kerouak, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs…

Of all God’s creatures, only man kills with malice. Only man kills out of vengeance.

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.

Oh. C’mon, pretty girl. I like it when ya scream.” The leader breathed into my ear. I spat as good as I could on his hand. He jumped back glaring. I said, “Funny. You like it when I scream? Yet you cover my mouth!” I laughed then winced.

Oh how precious it is… to allow yourself get shuttered in to million fragments, so that you can then rebuild – a better one!

Oh, how scary and wonderful it is that words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.

Oh r-really? Do t-tell?” I quirked an eyebrow back at him. “Well, usually it’s best to take your shoes and socks off before you step in the stream, better balance on an uneven surface. Also, you avoid that unpleasant squelchy feeling when you wear the shoes againlater.” He paused, smirking. “Also, if I was going to paddle barefoot “I was going to paddle barefoot upstream in Yorkshire, I’d wait until at least May before I tried it. But you go ahead, love. You’re clearly a Spartan lass.

Oh r-really? Do t-tell?” I quirked an eyebrow back at him.
 
“Well, usually it’s best to take your shoes and socks off before you step in the stream, better balance on an uneven surface. Also, you avoid that unpleasant squelchy feeling when you wear the shoes again later.” He paused, smirking. “Also, if
I was going to paddle barefoot upstream in Yorkshire, I’d wait until at least May before I tried it. But you go ahead, love. You’re clearly a Spartan lass.

Oh you're one of those people are you? The people who ask God for something and when they get it, they tell God to forget about answering that particular prayer because it's just happened. That's one of my pet hates, I'm sorry.

Oh yes, truth is stranger. That's why we wrap it in fiction. Like holding a conch shell to our ear and listening to the sea. Do you hear it?

On a nightstand in a teenager’s room, a glass vase filled with violets leans precariously against a wall. The only thing saving the vase from a thousand-piece death on the hardwood floor is the groove in the nightstand’s surface that catches the bottom of vase, and of course the wall itself. The violets, nearly a week old, droop in the light of a waning gibbous moon. Wrinkled petals are already piling up on the floor between the nightstand and the wall, and a girl only six days sixteen stares at the dying bouquet from her bed.

Once I finished reading a good book, it gives me a hard time coping up with reality.

Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soon as fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to the throat and brain, from fear of violence to the more nameless kind, you come to believe you are part of a horrible experiment. I learned to distrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When you gave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knew that ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence. Management asked for new ideas all the time; memos circulated down the echelons, requesting bold and challenging concepts. But I learned that new ideas could finish you unless you wrapped them in a plastic bag. I learned that most of the secretaries were more intelligent than most of the executives and that the executive secretaries were to be feared more than anyone. I learned what closed doors meant and that friendship was not negotiable currency and how important it was to lie even when there was no need to lie. Words and meanings were at odds. Words did not say what was being said nor even its reverse. I learned to speak a new language and soon mastered the special elements of that tongue.

Once I was King of the Titans. Now I need a MedicAlert bracelet and a subscription to the Safe Return program. Can you put out a Silver Alert on a god? I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

Once upon a time,’ is code for ‘I’m lying to you.’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.

Once you break someone’s heart, you are forever its master.

One cannot expect to travel far without faith.

One couldn’t be selective when remembering the past. Ignore the turmoil, chaos and pain – and the truly great memories would not shine with such luster.

One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.

...one had to expect very little—almost nothing—from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always trying to seize the days like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in the froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie-ed river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out, gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled–having allowed to be consoled–by the soft, generous, worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.

One is almost tempted to say... at last I can almost see a bond. But that will never be, for a bond does not really exist at all: it is a most convenient fiction which, as we have seen, is convenient both to experimental and theoretical chemists.

One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture; A pale blue eye with a film over it.

One of my professors once told me that the last official act of the British monarchy was when Queen Victoria refused to sign a law that made same-sex acts illegal. It would have made me think more highly of her, except the reason she objected was because she didn’t believe women would do anything like that. Parliament rewrote the law so it was specific to men, and she signed it. A tribute to enlightenment, Queen Victoria was not. Neither, as I have observed before, are werewolf packs.

One of the joys of reading as a writer is that your eye becomes educated: yes, you may become more critical and abandon a higher percentage of novels halfway through, but when a writer gets it really right, the pleasure and admiration can be all the more intense.

One of the things about writing that inspires--and impresses me, is the music words can make. And, like music, the spaces between the notes can mean as much as the notes themselves. -- The Jesus Horse

Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn't want.

One doesn't intentionally to alter the truth, just enhance it and make it more memorable.

One moment of true happiness was worth all the moments of pain. (Jessica)

One realizes the immortality of true love only after the lover dies

One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. It would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it teaches the unconscious.

One thing an early-on writer has to learn, is to be comfortable with and responsive to critique. When five people in a group tell you this chapter sucks; don’t snap back at them with, “Sure, but it gets better in another 6 or 7 chapters!” Listen. – Thank them. – Consider. They can look from a fresh perspective, and catch things that you might be too close to see. But, you will also learn along the way that not everyone in a group of relative amateurs themselves, is going to catch everything, and there will be a few who seem to never understand much of anything. Some will always want paragraphs chopped down to explosive missiles of passion, while others are more used to long composite paragraphs that I myself find impossible to wade through. You may, once you have hit your full stride and power, feel comfortable telling a few of them, “Look. This isn’t a diner. I don’t take orders: ‘I’m gluten intolerant; he can’t do salt; she’s allergic to peanuts ...’ “If what I offer is a salad bar, then No; I am not going to fry you up a cheesesteak!

One way to think about your life is as an extended free fall. An epiphany may help you see better as you fall. Rather than a meaningless blur, you will see rocks and trees and lizards. An epiphany is not a parachute.

One wrong social move---say---like hanging with the wrong person,” she said nastily, “Can make your life around here a living nightmare and I definitely don’t think that you want that.

On her way back to their room, it occurred to Nnu Ego that she was a prisoner, imprisoned by her love for her children, imprisoned by her role as the senior wife. She was not even expected to demand more money for her family; that was considered below the standard expected of a woman in her position. It was not fair, she felt, the way men cleverly used a woman’s sense of responsability to actually enslave her. They knew that the traditional wife like herself would never dream of leaving her children.

Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable...

Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone