Fiction Quotes

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

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.

We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

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

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

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

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

Truth is stranger than fiction-to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.

His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.