Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

The difference between science fiction and fantasy … is simply this: science fiction has rivets and fantasy has trees.

The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed ? the deed is everything.

The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.

The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been.

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

The exquisite truth is to believe in something that maybe you know is a fiction, but you believe in it willingly.

The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.

The facts of life are the impossibilities of fiction.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story.

The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there's anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it's that feeling. I always feel that way.

The fiction writer has a lot of balls to juggle. Setting, pacing, dialogue, and so on. And let's not forget: plot. That was always a hard one for me. And I always had this spastic tendency to wrap up a story before I'd seen it the whole way through, a sort of writer's pre-ejaculatory tendency: "The End!

The few really great-the major novelists ... are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

The fiction I tend to like is nothing like my own work. I like the kind of writing that shows me things I don't know about, and what I don't know about is the everyday, normal world.

The films that I loved growing up were the science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties [films], which were more about the people and how they are affected by the environments that they are in. Whether they are sort of futuristic or alien of whatever they are; that was the science fiction that I loved. So that is what we tried to make, the sort of film that felt like those old films.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.

The Forgotten Realms is arguable the most detailed, intricate fantasy setting ever created this side of Middle Earth. It's a setting for many D&D game products and lots of fiction. It is vast, historically and geographically and so contains just about anything you might imagine, at one place or time or another. Created by Ed Greenwood. And, for the record, Ed Greenwood is one of the smartest guys I've ever met.

The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.

The good thing about writing fiction is that you can get back at people.

The goal in blogging/ business/ inspiring non-fiction is to share a truth, or at least a truth as the writer sees it. To not just share it, but to spread it and to cause change to happen. You can do that in at least three ways: with research (your own or reporting on others), by building and describing conceptual structures, or with stories that resonate.

The Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen.

The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.

The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.

The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it's 'plausibly surreal' - it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

The idea of doing a period movie, some people say, "Isn't it odd that you're doing a period movie? That's a change of pace for you." And, I'm like, "Not really." When you're doing a science fiction movie, it's almost exactly the same.

The imagination is too often regarded merely as an indefinite, untraceable, indescribable something that does nothing but create fiction.

The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy.

The hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

[The inspiration that comes to authors of fiction] is not an act of intelligence.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

The key of writing fiction isn't just to remove something that the reader or listener can easily imagine. It's not a matter of being coy, or withholding information. It's allowing for multiple possibilities, recognizing the complexity of human behavior, and making the world of a piece of fiction as marvelously confounding as the world we live in.

The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.

The mainstream has lost its way. Crime fiction is an objective, realistic genre because it's about the real world, real bodies really being killed by somebody. And this involves the investigator in trying to understand the society that the person lived in.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.

The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just do fiction.

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

The most effective young Facebook users, however -- the ones who will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults -- are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

The most visceral science fiction always takes place in the past and focuses on the humdrum