Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

To me, science fiction is about the sense of mystery, the sense of awe. Not 'shock and awe', just 'awe.'

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to force him to lay it down with a higher ideal of life than he had when he took it up.

To newspapers and publishing houses I urge the use of fact over fiction, freedom of the press, and responsibility at all times.

Tony Black is the Tom Waits of Crime Fiction, yes, that good.

Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

To think that humans evolved from lower species BUT the evolutionary process somehow came to a halt and we all arrived at the finish line simultaneously is to embrace a fiction possibly more implausible than Christianity.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

True beauty dwells in deep retreats, Whose veil is unremoved Till heart with heart in concord beats, And the lover is beloved.

Truth and fiction are so aptly mixed that all seems uniform and of a piece.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more interesting.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Truth is stranger than fiction-to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.

Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. When in doubt, tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.

Truth is only stranger than fiction if you're a stranger to the truth. Which means you're either a liar or you're fictional.

Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance.

Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.

Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone's actual life experience.

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

Truth is not always injured by fiction.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

Unbind the charms that in slight fables lie and teach that truth is truest poesy.

Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

Usually at the core of fiction that has some element of the absurd there tends to be an examination of some societal ills that we should talk about more than we do. And it's funny, of course, so we have that release valve with absurdism. It offers us a safe way to explore difficult subject matter.

We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination.

[Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.

We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next.

We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.

We live in a violent world, but since the success of films like Pulp Fiction, it seems every movie has some violence in it, and it's now being used as a form of comedy: audiences are now being encouraged to laugh when people get their heads blown off. I just don't like hearing people laugh at violence.

We create truths by describing, or by re-describing , our beliefs and observations. Our task, and the task of every artist and scientist, is to re-describe our inherited assumptions and invented fictions in order to create new paradigms for the future.

We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

We have people being a little uncomfortable in their life on Earth with finances and so on, so Science Fantasy or Science Fiction allows people to think that there are possibilities beyond the gravity of our planet.

We live in a science fiction universe. We have done for a long time.

We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.

Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

We translated the script together with them. And during the process of translation, they rewrote the scripts. They put a lot into it. They made it their own. There are names of plants or chants or certain rites and everything that you cannot come across it in a movie. You know, you cannot learn about them casually. So the film doesn't have value in the ethnographical, anthropological. It's fiction.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.