Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

I enjoy women's conversation, and I think that helps me to describe them in fiction.

If anyone ever said biopic I would say, "It's not a biopic." We're fighting uphill against the weight of history. I was like, why don't we just call it historical fiction?

If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.

I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

I feel like science fiction can get a bad rap sometimes because people make something just to throw an alien in it or just to make it weird, and it doesn't really have a story.

I feel like science fiction is so much more mainstream now than it has been. And I feel like thats because technology has caught up with us.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

I felt like I was a writer, and I just thought filmmaking was the best way for me to express that, because it allows me to embrace the visual world that I love. It's allows me to interact with people, to be more social than fiction or poetry, and it felt like the right way for me to tell the stories that felt pressing to me.

... if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it?

If I couldn't be a fiction writer, I would be a roller coaster designer for theme parks

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me apologetically "I don't read fiction," I wouldn't have to write fiction anymore. And I share that fascination with the truth. I'm not looking down my nose at it.

If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.

I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.

I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer.

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.

I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, ther would be no need for fiction.

If literary fiction is reduced to only middle-class families dealing only with middle-class angst, then it’s really finished as a force for grappling with the world.

If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it.

If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days.

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.

If you make a movie about Elizabeth I, how much of the dialogue is her real words? Audiences know when they go see a movie that it is fiction.

If what we are doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it's probably not transformative enough

If you are inclined to leave your character solitary for any considerable length of time, better question yourself. Fiction is association, not withdrawal.

If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn't come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that's where the stimuli and influence comes from.

If you look for me, I'm in the fiction section. Romance has its own section.

If you're going to make a science fiction movie, then have a hover craft chase, for God's sake.

If you take the shackles off your imagination, you can go anywhere with science fiction.

If you start looking at movies on a moral level - "I don't like that, that hurts, that's mean, that's bad" - then I don't even want to talk to you. Or like, someone that says "I don't like science-fiction movies," or "I don't want to sit through a Western," or "I don't like violence in movies," then I completely tune out.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.

I get offered a lot of science fiction work and there is a new project in the pipeline called Master Race, set in World War II, but thats a little way off yet.

If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

I grew up reading crime fiction and, especially in the '80s, women were just there to be saved or screwed.

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.