Fiction Quotes - Page 66

I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process.

I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.

As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.

Who says that fictions only and false hair Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty? Is all good structure in a winding stair?

Next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.'

The once-science-fiction notion of hyper-connectivity - where we are all constantly connected to social networks and other bubbling streams of digital data - has rapidly become a widespread reality.

I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

Every fiction has its base in fact.

The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just do fiction.

I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.

American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

I'm a huge historical fiction and non-fiction fan.

No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.

Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.

In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.

In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it.

Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?"

I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.

It's hard to read real fiction. It takes time. It takes a sustained attention.