Top 100 Fiction Is What Quotes
#1. Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
Elizabeth Bowen
#2. What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk. We need to find out what fiction is, what it means, to us, an experience that is going to be unlike anyone else's experience of the story.
Neil Gaiman
#3. Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.
Eveli Acosta
#4. Fiction is what happens inside a writer's head. Reality takes place outside it
Barry A. Whittingham
#5. We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.
J. Michael Straczynski
#7. Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
Jeanette Winterson
#8. Science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction.
Damon Knight
#9. What is Gornite? Why can't you heat it? Will it make you laugh? - I hope so
Lucas Riddle
#10. Remember what I said. There's always a lot of autobiography in fiction and fiction in autobiography. It has to be that way otherwise they'd be unreadable (except by the author).
Nina Stibbe
#12. What we say about ourselves is always a form of fiction.
Marty Rubin
#13. Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
Linwood Barclay
#14. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
Nina Sankovitch
#15. Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
William Blake
#16. The best fiction is often how we interpret our own lives and what we see as our common due. It is created usually as a means of avoiding reality which, if seriously considered, might negate our ability to strive for what might seem impossible.
Anne Edwards
#17. As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
Charles De Lint
#18. I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.
Philip K. Dick
#19. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.
Haruki Murakami
#20. "Faith is what's wrong with the world, Aidan. Or don't you follow the news?"
"That's not faith," he says. "That's the complete lack of it. If any one of those mass-genocidal idiots had faith, they wouldn't have the insane need to prove it to others."
Cyma Rizwaan Khan
#21. There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision.
Henry Petroski
#22. I don't think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what's the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.
Percival Everett
#23. Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.
Theodore Sturgeon
#24. What most people see is a badge, behind and beyond the badge is what they need to know...the person.
Donna Brown
#25. I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
Philip Roth
#26. Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
Barry Unsworth
#27. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before.
Annalee Newitz
#28. A person is what he says and does; that's how you learn whether his reputation was earned or manufactured.
Orson Scott Card
#29. Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.
Ian Hickson
#30. True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about "knowing God," they mean more than, "I understand what you're saying about God," but also, "It fits my experience of Him.
Geoffrey Wood
#31. Nothing is 'wrong' with me, Dan. What's wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.
Martin Hopkins
#32. If what we are doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it's probably not transformative enough
Sergey Brin
#33. I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.
Jim Shepard
#34. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
Pat Barker
#35. In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art.
Bill Kovach
#36. We're just like the antiques. We grow old and get scarred and beat up along the way, and the only question becomes whether we're going to make it until we realize what we already have is valuable." --Faith Bass Darling's Last Garage Sale
Lynda Rutledge
#37. You get Don King's point of view in what is almost a Shakespearean, classical technique. He comes across almost like a lovable rogue, like Iago in 'Othello' or Richard III. He's doing all these bad things, but I kind of like him. It's like 'Pulp Fiction': Everybody's a bad guy, yet you like them.
Ving Rhames
#38. The question isn't what will a mother do to save her child. The question is, what won't a mother do to save her child!
Sunanda J. Chatterjee
#39. To be different is a lonely thing, and she has been lonely for such a long time. What she does frightens people, and she thinks, "Why shouldn't they be frightened? It's not normal: no one else does what I can do.
Helen Bell
#40. I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.
David O. Russell
#41. That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.
Zadie Smith
#42. The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.
Lisa Scottoline
#43. Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
Azar Nafisi
#44. I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.
Gary Shteyngart
#45. In life, you will hear many fantastical and astounding things, what is important is sorting out the fact from the fiction.
T.B. Christensen
#46. Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.
China Mieville
#47. What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies ... Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.
E.L. Doctorow
#48. Pain comes with the decision of choosing what I have to offer now, but this same pain is needed to shape you for the greater destiny ahead.
J.D. Netto
#49. You know what, Michael? I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship of loathing.
Meinos Kaen
#50. Saracen The Knight: There will be a cost.
Saint-Germain: Anything. I will pay anything to get my wife back.
Saracen: Even your immortality?
Saint-Germain: Even that. What's the point in living forever, when it is not with the woman I love?
Michael Scott
#51. What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh - and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.
Richard Dawkins
#52. Maybe I'm stupid. Maybe I'm just as evil as he is by keeping my mouth shut. But he told me once that I was different. And I can't help but hope that me being different is the one thing in this world that can save him from what he fears the most ... Himself.
Lauren Hammond
#53. Two types of prophecies exist. Those that will happen no matter what, and those that can be prevented. We can't know which is which.
Emlyn Chand
#54. My advice is to write about what you are interested in. If you read science fiction and fantasy, then write in that genre. If you read romance novels, then try writing one.
Michael Scott
#55. Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we've seen can't be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.
Adam Levin
#56. I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.
Ruth Rendell
#57. Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.
John McGahern
#58. I'm not sure what's more worrying. The list of demands or the fact he seems unaware the French stopped using francs in the last century and that Africa is a continent?" - Jerome
Jamie Scallion
#59. One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#60. The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.
Tim O'Brien
#61. (F)iction is...what ought to have been, not what actually was. At least, not exactly.
Charles McCarry
#62. Life's a lot different from what people pretend. That's why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I'm beginning to guess that everybody's like that.
Christopher Morley
#63. All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.
Orson Scott Card
#64. Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it's still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.
Abraham Verghese
#65. What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
Doris Lessing
#66. We have nothing left. Orphans. Castaways." She turns to me. "Childless. That is what we are. The unwanted or the un-killed. We
are together only by the wrongs done to us. There is no-one else to worry about us, to fear for our safety, or to give us comfort.
Bill Blais
#67. A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
Stanley Kubrick
#68. 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
#69. All novels ... are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?
Milan Kundera
#70. Tell you what, you let me go, and I'll ask you plenty of questions about your race. Until then, I'm slightly distracted with how this little vacation on the good ship Holy Sh*t is going to pan out for me.
J.R. Ward
#71. What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in - fully understand - the inward world of another person.
Rick Gekoski
#72. 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
#73. I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.
Alex Flinn
#74. Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened.
Kathleen Rooney
#75. At seventy-one you can't expect to hear a story, any story, and take it as it is. At my age a story stirs up a vortex that sucks into its eye more stories, and spits out still more. I must remember what I must.
Miroslav Penkov
#76. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
- Gandalf the Grey, The Fellowship of the Ring
J.R.R. Tolkien
#77. Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
Elizabeth McCracken
#78. 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
#79. I'm really such a bumbler! Writing fiction is like arranging furniture in a dark room. I can't see what I'm doing. I grope for the right words. I bump against the wrong words and stumble and stub my toe and curse and keep trying to guess what belongs in the space.
Joanna Scott
#80. Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.
Kelly Link
#81. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
Anne Enright
#82. I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.
Paul Park
#83. The pure perfect truth of life is that we are here to create heaven on earth, to bring the perfection of what is above down to us, and in doing so to become transformed as human being into something great and beautiful.
Kathleen McGowan
#84. In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
Lauren Groff
#85. This is important. Money on its most basic level is a hard fact - you either have it or you don't. But on it's emotional level it is purely a fiction. It becomes what you let it become.
Kent Nerburn
#86. The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
Alice McDermott
#87. Middle grade fiction, to me, is really about emergence of self. It's about expressing the idea that the world is going to start affecting you more, and your parents' influence is going to wane. Middle grade is when a lot of kids discover their passions - art, music, sports, what have you.
Greg Van Eekhout
#88. 75% of what happens to Paul Gascoigne in his life is fiction..
Glenn Hoddle
#89. I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma ... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Toni Morrison
#90. I guess what's most important is that we chose to live with our hearts open and to let our experiences show us the way towards our brightest days.
Brian Joyce
#91. what people write reflects what they believe - fiction is where you go to tell or read the truth that people will stare or laugh at you for expressing in real life.
Michael Marshall
#92. The mind of man can only teach what he has learned from others. It is how you use that knowledge that will decide who you are.
Micheal Rivers
#93. It proved what he had always instinctively known.
Love is Forever.
Anne Rouen
#94. I think fiction, for me, is a way of trying to understand why people do the things they do - and trying to explain what is, at heart, illogical.
Tess Gerritsen
#95. Books do pretend ... but squeezed in between is even more that is true - without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?
Matthew Pearl
#96. Reality is but several levels of consciousness that can be accepted or dismissed depending on what one perceives.
Lauren Lola
#97. You have considerable choice in how you end your fiction. For all stories, the basic rule is the same: Choose the type of ending that best suits what's gone before.
Nancy Kress
#98. Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#99. Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.
Barry Eisler
#100. Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming? ...
Eudora Welty
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