Fiction Quotes

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

“... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.”

“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?”

“The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.”

“Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.”

“Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.”

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

“The truer the facts the better the fiction.”

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”

“The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”

“There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.”

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”

“The only real people are the people who never existed.”

“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”

“Reality and Fiction are different in that fiction has to make sense.”

“I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.”

“Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.”

“It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”

“Those who say truth is stranger than fiction have wasted their time on poorly written fiction.”

“The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.”

“Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”

“The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.”

“The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.”