Art In Fiction Quotes

#1. Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

Raymond Chandler

#2. In high school, I was very active in extracurricular activities such as art, theatre, and choir. I also wrote for the school newspaper, but not regularly, because I never liked writing non-fiction very much.

Meg Cabot

#3. To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

Deborah Eisenberg

#4. Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

Edmund White

#5. The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Tom Wolfe

#6. If you write literary fiction that's set partly in the future, you're apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.

Emily St. John Mandel

#7. The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.

Herbert Spencer

#8. Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

Joanna Scott

#9. In writing, there is art. And in art there is craft ...

Susi Moore

#10. Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing ...

Ellen Glasgow

#11. Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. "There I'm only myself," she'd said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.

Laura Anderson Kurk

#12. There's an expression, "God is in the details," and it applies to nothing more than it does to the writing of fiction. To that and to the art of telling good lies. And what is fiction but the telling of lies?

Donna Levin

#13. Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no "epilogues", so why should art or literature?

Dan Simmons

#14. Of all the hardships and deprivations a people can suffer, I am not sure if the deprivations of art and culture are not the most devastating. As meat and rice are food for the body, art and culture are food for the soul. Starve the body and the person dies; starve the soul and the spirit dies.

Gerard De Marigny

#15. Energy manipulation took place completely in mind,same way believing in telepathy caused telepathic abilities to grow STRONGER.

Christina Westover

#16. Surreal fiction is a sophisticated art form. Events happen divorced from conventional logic, as events in a dream may happen. But unlike dreams, everything in the story contributes to an overall coherent point, impression or emotion.

Nancy Kress

#17. Kitsch parodies catharsis ... It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts ...

Theodor Adorno

#18. In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

Mary Augusta Ward

#19. 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?

Virginia Woolf

#20. He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was
if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way.

Kurt Vonnegut

#21. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression" - from "The Art of Fiction

Henry James

#22. What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.

'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.

Natasha Pulley

#23. What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

Claude Calame

#24. Ome INSIDE is home shining brightly above all homes in physical world.

Christina Westover

#25. For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.

C.J. Cherryh

#26. The others forgot the work and the weather watching them throw. It was art. A thousand dollars a throw in Madison Square Garden wouldn't have gotten any more breathless suspense. It would have just been more people holding in.

Zora Neale Hurston

#27. The fiction is like the art, in making stuff out of nothing, in creating a hyper-reality to have an experience. If it's strong enough, and your spell is strong enough, then you become, like, ultra-magnetic and then everything comes to you.

Watkin Tudor Jones

#28. Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?

Arthur Phillips

#29. Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

Annie Dillard

#30. If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.

Matthew Modine

#31. I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

George Hickenlooper

#32. The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.

Imre Kertesz

#33. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.

Jess Row

#34. Dull late-afternoon light glittered on the hanging copper pots in the kitchen where the old painter sat with his wine, smoking cigarette, a letter angrily crumpled on the table in front of him.

Stephanie Cowell

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

Virginia Woolf

#36. Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.
There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

Joyce Carol Oates

#37. The wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#38. In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art.

Bill Kovach

#39. Pimping is an art, Whoreson. There are very few pimps in this world who can really take the title of being a pimp. Just because a man gets his money from a whore, that don't make him no true pimp. Real pimps are really rare.

Donald Goines

#40. I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.

T.C. Boyle

#41. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#42. Never run upstairs when someone's chasing you. Don't try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.

Mark Zero

#43. What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

Aleksandar Hemon

#44. Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.

Tom Rachman

#45. Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

Lauren Beukes

#46. There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

Flannery O'Connor

#47. A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated - as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

Ayn Rand

#48. If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

Chris Abani

#49. Isherwood did not so much find himself in Berlin as reinvent himself; Isherwood became a fiction, a work of art.

Ian Buruma

#50. Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

Tim O'Brien

#51. You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Ethan Canin

#52. And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.

Mark Zero

#53. I feel like a sailor, or better, like an explorer of the immense universe of art. The artist is a discoverer in search of the keys that open the door to emotions and feelings . Art is the place where rationality, fantasy, truth and fiction mix up in a detonating mixture.

Augusto De Luca

#54. When you're used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...

Mark Zero

#55. I like characters. I like spirited characters whether they exist in fiction or real life. Whether they're the invention of artistic people or directors, musicians. I think music and art and fashion designers inspire me and I like characters.

Marc Jacobs

#56. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.

Eudora Welty

#57. Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?

Jonathan Galassi

#58. I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

David Bowie

#59. But then, that's the beauty of writing stories - each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]

T.C. Boyle

#60. Fiction seeks to represent human experience as it is lived and as it reverberates in our hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. So much of our lives are internal. The art of fiction has claimed - more than anything else - this internal ground as its own.

Varley O'Connor

#61. I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

Noah Baumbach

#62. I had a conversation with a biologist in an art gallery, and he persuaded me that it was possible to grow a dress from microbes. It was the craziest thing I had ever heard, but I'm a bit of a science fiction fan and I thought it sounded like an interesting challenge.

Suzanne Lee

#63. She knew better: when artistry seems most elusive is when you must focus, dig deep, and force yourself to think about how to give form to an idea that seems too vague to express.

Maryanne O'Hara