Fiction Quotes - Page 26

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper.

75% of what happens to Paul Gascoigne in his life is fiction.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

And for the authentical truth of either person or actions, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? Poor envious souls they are that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions; material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy.

I tend to read non-fiction.

I'm not the best audience for that because I'm not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that.

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

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

Returning to writing fiction after 13 years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It's what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It's how I got my start as a writer.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Fiction may be said to be the caricature of history.

Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.