Fiction Quotes

“While I find inspiration in real life, the actual stories are, thankfully, works of fiction - which, given the considerable turmoil in my character's lives, is probably a good thing!”

“Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures?”

“The purpose of fiction is not to nail you to the ground as facts do, but to take you to the edge of the cliff and kick you off so you build your wings on the way down.”

“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.”

“The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.”

“Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.”

“Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”

“A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.”

“Hero: Person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it.”

“Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.”

“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.”

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

“The reason why truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent.”

“Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. When in doubt, tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.”

“Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.”

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

“Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.”

“Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'”

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

“Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.”

“The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.”

“Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.”

“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”

“Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.”

“The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.”