Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.

A lot of people mistake the persona that I create in poetry and fiction with me. A lot of people claim to know me who don't really know me. They know the work, or they know the persona in the work, and they confuse that with me, the writer. They don't realize that the persona is also a creation and a fabrication, a composite of my friends and myself all pasted together.

A lot of times in my short fiction there isn't much dramatized scene - there are a lot of short, interconnected bits, snippets of conversation, continual action, and so on. I frequently rely pretty heavily on voice.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake", there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.

A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.

Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.

Amy Rapp, my producing partner, and I are drawn to character-driven material. We're developing and producing movies and TV, fiction and non-fiction, studio and independent, broadcast and cable, theatre, and web so our slate is really diverse.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

And for the authentical truth of either person or actions, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? Poor envious souls they are that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions; material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy.

And there are rules for crime fiction. Or if not rules, at least expectations and you have to give the audience what it wants.

And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.

And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

An old novel has a history of its own.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

Anybody who grew up with the space program is a fan of science fiction.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, . . . for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.

Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.

Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.

Anything that has to do with noir and space, I'm gonna love. When you've got a noir-ish, pulpy detective in a science fiction show, I'm all in, in that regard.

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

Apparently I’ve been typecast in science fiction: I’m a Russian bisexual telepathic Jew.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.

A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.

Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

Arthur Clarke says that I am first in science and second in science fiction in accordance with an agreement we have made. I say he is first in science fiction and second in science.

Arnošt Lustig is one of the leading contemporary Czech fiction writers, and certainly the most important Jewish writer of Bohemia to have survived the Holocaust.

As a fiction writer, of course, you need to take some leeway with certain aspects of history to make the story work.

Artworks, whether fiction, music, or painting, because they have the power and possibility to become truth, when repeated enough or told enough are somehow truth about what America is, whether they were or not.

A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.

As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.

As a kid I was enamored with fiction, most of it utterly forgettable and long forgotten.