Fiction Quotes

I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfaste...

He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than ...

Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.

When the world uncovers some dark disguise,Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.

What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-co...

but in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to kee...

but in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to kee...

The education of youth belongs to the priests, yet they do not take so much care of instructing them...

As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actua...

I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing th...

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral stru...

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the tr...

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can a...

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the tr...

As it turned out, the sachem had been dead wrong.The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, sai...

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened...

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there...

The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in eit...

Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. A...

Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

There is power in controlling something that can do so much damage-in controlling something, period.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: tha...

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth...

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thou...

I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.

Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all ...

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly...

The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling ...

They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were b...

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, ban...

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.

They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat o...

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that w...

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that ...

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

You know, one of the interesting things you find about writing fiction is that any fiction you write...

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history....

That was a stupid idea I made up while drunk. Why did someone build that?

I'm a writer. I write checks. Mostly fiction.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest sp...

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to...

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. ...

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what ...

The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fict...

I'm warning you. I'm going to get waxy. D'you see? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to ha...

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature ...

A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It ...

Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange ...

For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of ...

American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem...

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded ...

They again kissed each other and fell asleep. The patch of light on the ceiling now seemed to be ass...

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same l...

Sensationalism dies quickly, fear is long-lived.

At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was...

You've a pretty good nerve," said Ratchett. "Will twenty thousand dollars tempt you?"It will not."If...

It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everyb...

He had gone again and, emboldened by his first successful trip, had chosen a different sort of world...

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wol...

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetr...

If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes s...

Most science fiction, quite frankly, is silly nonsense.

Every sport pretends to be literature. . .

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you ...

Only death can finish the fight, everything else only interrupts the fighting.

The Witcher had a knife to his throat. He was wallowing in a wooden tub, brimfull with soapsuds, his...

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases t...

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had b...

Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

This is only a work of fiction , The Truth as always will be far stranger

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to c...

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curves of a wood there rose in the distance a grey,...

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully u...

Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispe...

Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.

Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its h...

Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.

The hardest lesson is Clare’s solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I’v...

Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes in...

These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story i...

The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times. The formula for telling a powerful ...

Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.