Fiction Quotes - Page 35

Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.

Blogging has helped create an expanded awareness of the creative nonfiction genre, generally. But I suspect many bloggers continue to be unaware that they are (or have the potential to be) "literary" or "artful."

It's hard to get justice in the real world. It's possible in fiction.

With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.

It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestrial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction.

I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.

In fiction, you can be as true as you want. Real life is a different story.

Fantasy is the oldest form of literature and science fiction is just a new twist on it.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.

Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.

You can do anything you like, it's all fiction.

When we risk no contradiction, It prompts the tongue to deal in fiction.

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.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.