Fiction Quotes - Page 31

What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told.

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

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

When I was little, I made up my own fairy tales, and the ghostly echo of Once upon a time shapes all the fiction Ive ever written.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

Actually, I'm addicted to science fiction. Let me make my diction clear - I love sci-fi.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.

I have been induced to adopt this course by a desire that my readers should be taught to think as well as to experiment, and thus be qualified at an early part of their study to discriminate between the true and the false, and acquire the facts of the science without being mystified by its fictions.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

The facts of life are the impossibilities of fiction.

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;—in that of poets of amusement—in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition,—and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.

In science fiction a fantastic event or development is considered rationally.

Purpose is a man-made fiction. Nobody on their deathbed gets a plaque that says "he focused on only one thing for his entire life!" Those are counterfeit thoughts in a counterfeit society.

Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us.

[Social] science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance on human beings.

In the theory of evolution there is no talk of God and no Bibles are used. They're not looking for higher powers, extraterrestrials, or anything else that could be found in the science fiction section, because they are not dealing with fiction.

I always wanted to be a writer! But I wanted to do other things, too - be a psychologist, a librarian, et cetera. Now Ive decided that reading fiction that features characters who are in those professions will do.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.