Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

Next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.'

Nick Yablon ranges widely, from log cabins to skyscrapers and from Tocqueville to pulp fiction. He combines imaginative research with probing interpretation. Untimely Ruins offers fresh and challenging insights about the American built environment on nearly every page.

Ninety percent of SF [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.

No matter what decade science fiction comes from, it's representing the present.

No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.

Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.

Now, Venus is an extremely hostile environment, and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science fiction author who wants to create life there. However, as I began to research it more thoroughly, I found myself intrigued by the possibilities the world offers.

Obviously I don't want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct - I'm not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappear, and you just have science fiction.

Nuclear terrorism is still often treated as science fiction. I wish it were. But unfortunately we live in a world of excess hazardous materials and abundant technological know-how, in which some terrorists clearly state their intention to inflict catastrophic casualties. Were such an attack to occur, it would not only cause widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy... [creating] a second death toll throughout the developing world.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

Obviously not a Stephen King level writer, but I'd written short stories and short fiction, from the time I was 12.

Obsession is so extreme and so hard to imagine with the rational mind that it has a science-fiction-like quality to it-it's almost as if the obsessed one has been taken over by a replica, a pod, a facsimile of the rational person.

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.

One of my favorite things about supernatural fiction is its vast array of creatures.

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

One of the many things that surprised me about Wool is how many of its fans don't consider themselves science fiction readers.

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.

One of the things that all authors of fiction must learn to judge is whether - and in what detail - to describe the face of a character.

One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.

One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.

Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevation the State to the level of de jure universality

One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

On Stranger Than Fiction, the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page.

Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.

Partition is after all only an old fortress of crumbled masonry - held together with the plaster of fiction.

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.