Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.

The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.

Theology created the fiction of Satan which represents the revolt if an infinite being against the existence of an absolute infinity, against God.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.

[T]he one indispensable ingredient of science fiction [is] a belief in a world being changed by man's intellect, a conviction that what was being written could really happen.

The once-science-fiction notion of hyper-connectivity - where we are all constantly connected to social networks and other bubbling streams of digital data - has rapidly become a widespread reality.

The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

The motives to actions and the inward turns of mind seem in our opinion more necessary to be known than the actions themselves; and much rather would we choose that our reader should clearly understand what our principal actors think than what they do.

The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.

The Place of No Shadows, in Isaac Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine (1990) In our Universe, matter is arranged in a hierarchy of structures by successive integrations.

The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.

The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.

The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.

The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

The problem with the term "The New Fiction" is that the fiction will inevitably be old. The same could have been said about the work of any generation of writers.

The purpose of fiction is not to nail you to the ground as facts do, but to take you to the edge of the cliff and kick you off so you build your wings on the way down.

The protocols of science fiction and the protocols of science are not separate-they'r e woven together.

There are lots of futurists that spend their whole life trying to figure out who we're going to be in 40, 50, 60, 100 years. That's the great thing about science fiction.

There are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them.

The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments.

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.

There are plenty of characters of color in fantasy and science fiction. But when you ask the question, "How many of them on-screen have rich, thought-out backgrounds and family elements to draw on?," you quickly find out that the answer is not very many.

The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth

There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace.

The reason why truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent.

There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.

There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.

There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.

There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.

There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions - is he tall, is he short? - he had better quit.

There is a document in every novel in the world. Even in the most fantastic novel, even in science fiction, there is a documentary side. But, this side is not the crux of the matter.

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

There is a insularity within American fiction even for adults. It's very tough for books in translation in the US.

There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.

The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.

There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.

There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality.

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.

There may be certain genres that men dominate, but fiction not so much. The question of prizes is tricky because there are so many prizes.

There's a fine line between fiction and non-fiction and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979

There's a lot of fiction from that period that we're nostalgic for.

There's a lot of crap out there. Most of the science fiction films alone are abominations, you know. They're mindless. So you can't learn from those kinds of films.