Fiction Quotes - Page 36

A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what's fiction?

I just love historical fiction.

Cross-pollination and "contamination" is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.

Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

[Science fiction is] a specialized type of fantasy, in which the prime assumption usually is a new scientific discovery or invention.

We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Fiction intended to please, should resemble truth as much as possible.

Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

There is nothing in religion but fiction.

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to force him to lay it down with a higher ideal of life than he had when he took it up.

That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.

Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'

The average ground temperature of the Earth is impossible to measure since most of the Earth is ocean...So this average ground temperature is a fiction.

I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.

I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

While it is not always profitable to analogize "fact" to "fiction," La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.