Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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 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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

Paranormal fiction offers authors - and readers - the chance to answer the question, what if? All the different ways that question can be answered make for extremely entertaining reading.

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

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

People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?

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

People like Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and M. L. K. are larger than life to me. I find myself staring at photographs of Lincoln almost in disbelief that he was a man who walked the earth and not merely some fiction writer's creation.

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

People who love science fiction really do love sex.

People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.

Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.

Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new creation, and combinations are simply endless.

Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.

Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

Poetry is a kind of gasp, and there it is, a spark on the page. Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.

Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.

Prose of the World is an enormously compelling and vivid study. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English.

Prose is like a window; fiction is like a door. But it is not uncommon that he who should come in through the door jumps in through the window.