Fiction Quotes - Page 15

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy.

[Statistics] Fiction in its most uninteresting form.

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

There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.

Time is, as you are probably aware, merely a convenient fiction. There is no such thing as time.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

The films that I loved growing up were the science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties [films], which were more about the people and how they are affected by the environments that they are in. Whether they are sort of futuristic or alien of whatever they are; that was the science fiction that I loved. So that is what we tried to make, the sort of film that felt like those old films.

I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Who are we? And to me that's the essential question that's always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are - at their very best - evocations of that question. When we look up at the night sky and wonder, "Is there anyone else out there?" we're also asking who we are we in relation to them.

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

In really, really good science fiction the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.

I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan.

At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

I can't read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.

When I was a child, science fiction was the first source I've found for information. Science fiction was a very very low cultural stream in those days. It was completly below the radar and no one bothered to censurate it.

I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it's the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that's why I'm attracted to it.

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.

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