Fiction Quotes

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little materia...

It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what...

If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?

Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.

I imagine some people, like some toys, are born defective - which I suppose makes us all broken toys...

ligion is the opiate of the masses." "I did masses of opiates religiously.

I think that's just a story.""But, Jace," she said. "All stories are true.

My one true love remains my self... I dump myself occasionally to keep it interesting

She shook her head. She was so pale under the diffuse lamp-light that she looked almost transparent,...

Surely, she was too young to have so many ghosts.

Fiction is truth, even if it is not a fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your br...

Your pretense does not fool me, gnome. My eye will be upon you.

There is truth in stories. There is truth in one of your paintings, boy, or in a sunset or a couplet...

I write fiction""What’s fiction?""Fiction is an improvement on life.

Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent underneath the holly! We know you, and h...

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all...

The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was ...

Any capitalist . . . who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder ...

There's no such thing as fiction", Annie told him once. "If you can imagine something, then it's hap...

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical p...

No; you shall tear yourself away, none shall help you: you shall yourself pluck out your right eye; ...

I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something sma...

In relationship there are always two types of person: one weaker and the other stronger one. It's ne...

The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody sa...

You need to claim the driver's seat," Cash said. "Never take a backseat in your own life! You gotta ...

It's a tough world to find yourself in, but an even tougher one to be yourself in

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

From 1929 to 1933, [age 25-29] I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to...

Life's a lot different from what people pretend. That's why pretending is fun. I used to think it wa...

Come, kiss me sweet, and then let us return to bed, for I am tired, and I would sleep.

The greatest enemy is one that has nothing to lose.

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.

No, it’s not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like H...

They placed their bets with such self righteous bravado, but I’m the one who lost.

The only way that America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate t...

Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your p...

Well, I didn't really know what to say. So maybe I should say that I have thought about you and I li...

There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enor...

I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore an...

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

When we front a fiction, we are destined for loneliness.

To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, ...

Isn’t antimatter what fuels the U.S.S.Enterprise?

Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong...

If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it...

Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall ...

People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and p...

Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, m...

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict ...

If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going b...

Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need ...

Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture pr...

How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. adve...

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished...

Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illumin...

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it wer...

Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all tha...

Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues

A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat

Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither.

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

Where does fiction end and reality begin?

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look a...

I feel ill," [Howl] announced. "I'm going to bed, where I may die.

Annoyed?” said Sophie. “Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, a...

Before long, everyone was giving him answers, and feeling a little superior, because it was really r...

Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soonas fear begins to ascend, anatomi...

Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn’t like things that were i...

There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subside...

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vo...

What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much...

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men whe...

I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something abou...

Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more...

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

The lights were off so that his heads could avoid looking at each other because neither of them was ...

The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter in...

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he rea...

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever an...

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it wo...

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or...

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good lite...

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into wh...

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of lit...

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their...

I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices ...

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause...

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the ...

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my dec...

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us h...