Fiction And Literature Quotes

#1. I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.

Sam Weller

#2. The chaos of their voices registers as a single, overwhelming force cutting off her ability to reason, and all she wants is to get as far away from people as possible.

Zainab Omaki

#3. In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance.

Michael Dirda

#4. I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.

David Nicholls

#5. Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover's privilege.

J.M. Barrie

#6. Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.

Elliott Colla

#7. So, fuck 'em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We're GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker's jackets.

Hal Duncan

#8. Popular fiction's a strong and viable force in literature. That's why it's popular.

Nora Roberts

#9. I am gone tomorrow. And there and gone again by the time you read this.

Salvador Plascencia

#10. The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they're good, that's terrific. If they're not, they're not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium.

Stephen King

#11. Nonfiction is a form of literature that lies halfway between fiction and fact.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#12. And what is gossip anyway?Just fragments of sad accounts, maneuvered and mutilated year after year for our sinful pleasure.

Kanza Javed

#13. The characters act for reasons that they can't control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it's all just puppetry on the part of the writer.

Johnny Rich

#14. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.

Sarah Moss

#15. 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

#16. It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe.

Margaret Atwood

#17. There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.

Angela Carter

#18. The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.

Mark Zero

#19. When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

Valentina Knurova

#20. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.

Teju Cole

#21. This isn't some LA country rock jam reminiscing on the pyschtotropic pot pansies of Haight Ashbury . This is the soot and smut of London mate !

Saira Viola

#22. I'm the muhfucka that did this to you! If y'all don't know me, you better get to know me, or fuck around and wind up wit' a hole in your forehead.

Brooklyn June

#23. Themes that are "too large for adult fiction can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book" - Philip Pullman
(Hunt and Lenz, 2001, p. 122 as cited by Hunt, 2005, p. 204)

Philip Pullman

#24. I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?

Ernest Hemingway,

#25. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.

E. M. Forster

#26. The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

Richard Dawkins

#27. Science fiction and fantasy literature has always been defined by tales of heroism. It is meant to represent humanity at our very best, willing to oppose all odds in order to protect the side of good.

Mira Grant

#28. Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history - however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity - remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction

Hermann Hesse

#29. I liked the darkness, the dusty bay window, the view over the grey, muddy harbour and the towering cliffs beyond. How could I think of all that and dislike it, really, when in every nook and cranny I felt Peter's eyes peering out, watching me?

Ava Bloomfield

#30. I'm naming my son just what he is. I'm a whore and he is my son. If he grows up ashamed of me, the hell with him. That's what I'm wantin' to name him, and that's what it's goin' to be. Whoreson!

Donald Goines

#31. For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.

Yukio Mishima

#32. You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.

Flannery O'Connor

#33. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

#34. Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead.

Alexei Panshin

#35. Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

Chinua Achebe

#36. The kindest thing you can offer an author is a review and a star rating. So appreciated.
THE GOLDEN PEACOCK has had a successful 5-star run on Goodreads and on Amazon. Thank you!" Lauren B. Grossman

Lauren B. Grossman

#37. In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.

Frederick Lenz

#38. All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.

Marty Rubin

#39. America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe.

Thomas M. Disch

#40. Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.

Tom Shippey

#41. The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

Jorge Luis Borges

#42. That's why literature is so fascinating. It's always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's never the same thing twice.

Sara Raasch

#43. Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.

Adrian McKinty

#44. In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#45. Seasons didn't come behind the nicotine-stained walls of Mountain City's prison, so Harm always imagined it spring--the locust trees clustered with shaggy white blooms, the wet woods flecked with bloodroot, and wild roses and honeysuckle flashing white among the chestnuts on the mountainsides...

Sharyn McCrumb

#46. It's okay to dress up like another person, but never try to be someone else. Just try to be yourself, because that's what makes you special. Oh, and watch out if a dragon ever starts to dance ballet.

Jeff Hutchins

#47. Dear family,

I am drafting a new laundry protocol for better and more considerate usage of the washing machine

Koh Choon Hwee

#48. Poetry is a tool for writers to create literature in different forms of expression and messages.

Vanessa M Chattman

#49. In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.

Steve Erickson

#50. The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

Flannery O'Connor

#51. It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

Isaac Asimov

#52. Fantasy stories will always be popular, as there are always readers who are willing to escape, freely, to the worlds that the authors create, and spend time with the characters we give life to.

Jason Ellis

#53. 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

#54. I wake up and look at that bridge, try to count the red taillights I see heading east every morning, a kind of rosary as I pray for another crisis to dwarf the one defining us right now.

K.I. Hope

#55. I'm sure you can manage from here, and without a further word, he walked out of her room, then let himself out of her flat.

M.F. Roberts

#56. Calling one thing 'literature' and another 'fiction' is a way to create status where there is none.

Tucker Max

#57. This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.

Mark Zero

#58. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I

Harlan Ellison

#59. The feeling, all encompassing, safe and warm like a blanket permanently draped over her shoulders, follows her around. She takes it into the shower, to meals with her mother and sister, to work as she reads out the news script, her voice never faltering.

Zainab Omaki

#60. As they walked, it seemed almost every building had some similar contrivance as decoration, adorning the street in a cacophony of clangs, bangs and whirs. The street's surroundings danced with steam and smoke, the scent of oil and grease its perfume.

A.F. Stewart

#61. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

Fay Weldon

#62. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Robert Staughton Lynd

#63. When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.

Nalo Hopkinson

#64. The difference between an achiever and a loser is,
An achiever never gives up, never settles and lastly never forgets.

Akash Lakhotia

#65. At 2:00 sharp on the afternoon of his internment, with his body resting in a casket in the front room of his home, the pallbearers--all bridge players--stuck a deck of cards in Mr. Hampton's cold hands, shut the lid over his head, and played bridge.

Brenda Sutton Rose

#66. In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

Aleksandar Hemon

#67. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Stephen King

#68. Perfect," he groaned. "You are perfect." He sank his teeth into her ass, hard, drawing blood. "And now you wear my mark," he finished proudly. "Your ass is mine.

Hanna Lui

#69. At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.

Angela Carter

#70. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!

Jeff Hutchins

#71. The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

Jon Spaihts

#72. The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.

Will Christopher Baer

#73. Fantasy is the oldest form of literature and science fiction is just a new twist on it.

Katharine Kerr

#74. Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut

#75. If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.

Graham Joyce

#76. The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures
I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.

Paul Theroux

#77. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

Gabrielle Zevin

#78. In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby.

Parul Wadhwa

#79. I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

Philip Pullman

#80. To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.

Edward W. Said

#81. We would learn as much as we could, be as honourable as we could, be as courageous as we could, and be as happy as we could.

S.L. Mills

#82. Reading lets our mind visit new exciting worlds"

~Vianka Van Bokkem

Vianka Van Bokkem

#83. Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide.

Sharyn McCrumb

#84. Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.

Edward Fahey

#85. The problem was not an issue of availability because there were African girls everywhere. Christopher met them in church, in bars and in the cafeteria on the ground floor of the Sir Duncan Rice library.

Ayibu Makolo

#86. 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

#87. Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

Henry James

#88. Amie frowned. 'That's what I can't figure out. I mean everyone wants their happy ending, right? No one cares about reading actual literature anymore anyway. All they want is vampires and supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It's sick, really.

Jennifer Silverwood

#89. The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.

E. M. Forster

#90. 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

#91. But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#92. I want you forever. I will always be with you. I will always love you. I will love, honor, and cherish you for all eternity.

Katrina D. Miller

#93. I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times.

Bill Styron

#94. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.

Flannery O'Connor

#95. Ari's words felt like drops of sunlight upon my skin, and my frame was burning with longing.

Petra March

#96. I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

Lafcadio Hearn

#97. What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.

Orson Scott Card

#98. The first time Kiya met Hapi was over a year ago. On that day, she was at the temple - not to sell pigeons and bread as usual, but to pray and offer sacrifices on the altar of Horus - the God of protection.

Mirette Baghat

#99. My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

Frederik Pohl

#100. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.

William James