Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.

For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.

For years, we in publishing have been hearing from Catholic readers that they really yearn for Catholic fiction.

Freedom of the will is a psychological fiction.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

From about the age of 15 or 16 I'd had the notion that I wanted to write fiction, and I'd done enough in college to satisfy myself that I had a knack for it - I wouldn't call it "talent" - though I wondered if I'd ever have the guts to actually commit to it.

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.

Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

Geoff Nelder inhabits Science Fiction the way other people inhabit their clothes.

Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.

Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

Good fiction challenges us as much as it entertains and these days, we could do with both of these things.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.

gossip ... is only fiction produced by non-professionals.

Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.

Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it.

Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.

Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable — and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.

History is not going to look kindly on us if we just keep our head in the sand on armed autonomous robotics issue because it sounds too science fiction.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

Geoff Nelder's ARIA has the right stuff. He makes us ask the most important question in science fiction-the one about the true limits of personal responsibility.

Give me B movies or give me death!

God, how that stings! I've spent a lifetime loving science fiction and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that's just science fiction.

Going back to the noir fiction of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It's very contemporary.

Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.

Good fiction doesn't come out of the basic conflict of good versus bad. Instead, it comes out of a conflict between good and good.

Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but less by assimilation than by friction.

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

Happily, fantastic fiction is slowly gaining in status.

Happy endings are a luxury of fiction

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private.

Having done, you know, science fiction, I didn't want to get trapped in science fiction. So my eclecticism was my only conscious choice. I didn't want to find myself in a niche that I couldn't get out of.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's cool, clammy, twisty 1955 thriller Diabolique is an almost perfect movie about a very nearly perfect murder, a film in which the artist's methods and the killers' are ideally matched, equal in cunning and in ruthlessness. The screenplay, adapted by Clouzot and three other writers from a novel by the crack French crime-fiction team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, is a fantastically elaborate piece of contrivance, but the scrupulous realism of the direction makes the unnatural tale somehow feel entirely likely.

Honest fiction may be made to supplement the pulpit.

Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.

How do you document real life, when real life's getting more like fiction each day.

How easy it is to tell tales!

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years - I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction.

I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.