Fiction Quotes - Page 40

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

I have no interest in non-fiction. I don't read it and don't watch it and don't write it, other than a little journalistic column.

I really like stories, so in a way it doesn't matter for me if they are real or fiction.

It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.

It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

I was writing fiction steadily, but I found that the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative.

If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it.

Quantum fiction is any story that witnesses life and the human experience on a subatomic level.

Our lives are fictions, a work we leave behind, signed.

Steve Mosby has become one of a handful of writers who make me excited about crime fiction.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.