Top 100 Fiction Reading Quotes
#1. Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did.
Elin Hilderbrand
#2. I like to read fiction, and I particularly enjoy reading young adult fiction. But I also read children's books, adult books, current authors, and classics, but I like fiction the most.
James Howe
#3. Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).
Frederik Pohl
#4. I didn't read comic books, growing up. I was more of a science fiction/fantasy novel guy. I loved reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Tarzan' and that kind of stuff.
Jesse L. Martin
#5. I wondered, reading about the college discussions, whether, one day, people would put a trigger warning on my fiction. I wondered whether or not they would be justified in doing it. And then I decided to do it first.
Neil Gaiman
#6. Good fiction often gives us characters in extremity, which ironically gives us a clearer mirror in which to see ourselves.
Sarah Van Arsdale
#7. We liked to believe there is an alternate world, a better world, populated entirely by characters created by the yearnings of humanity
governing and inspiring themselves with all the lucidity wit which we rendered them.
Miguel Syjuco
#8. He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heavensent dreams and divine possibilities.
Jack London
#9. 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
#10. I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.
Jean Giono
#11. TV and film were always governing passions of mine, and that first wave of great HBO shows in the early years of the millennium was feeding my desire for fiction more than the books I was reading.
Nic Pizzolatto
#12. The letter of application ... should be a masterpiece of fiction, papering over all the cracks. Get it properly typed on decent writing paper. Never let it run over the page, people get bored with reading.
Jilly Cooper
#13. Books can be viewed as food for the mind
Stop reading and your brain can become anemic
Read junk and your thinking can become malnourished
But handle your diet with books well and your life long learning never stops
Jonathan Frakes
#14. I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film.
Kevin Wilson
#15. Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.
Jeanette Winterson
#16. 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
#17. In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.
Alice McDermott
#18. You can't write any form of fiction unless you enjoy reading it. You must be sincere in your approach. It's no good despising the form. So many people think they could earn some money from writing something for which they have no affection. It won't work. The first thing you have to have is belief.
Charlotte Bingham
#19. I stoped reading science fiction once I saw that the UFO was real. It became science fact that just hasn't been proven yet.
Mike Bird
#20. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
#21. The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
Wilkie Collins
#22. 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
#24. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children ... do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.
Neil Gaiman
#25. In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.
David Bergen
#26. Feelings, too, are facts. Emotion is a fact. Human experience is a fact. It is often possible to gain more real insight into human beings and their motivation by reading great fiction than by personal acquaintance.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#27. His chief interest was in reading fiction, then trying to analyze what he had read, fitting it into a larger pattern.
Stephen King
#28. Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it. I was going to be a lawyer, but I got saved.
Alan Dean Foster
#30. He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.
Neal Stephenson
#31. As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.
Gregory Benford
#32. I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.
Mary Pope Osborne
#33. I was looking to do something non-fiction because I had done a strip, 'My Mom Was a Schizophrenic.' I really enjoyed the process of doing that strip, despite its subject matter. To do it I'd had to do a lot of research and reading and I figured I'd like to do that again.
Chester Brown
#34. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
Flannery O'Connor
#35. We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.
Junot Diaz
#37. My house is filled with books, most of which I have read, some of which I intend to eventually get to. I'm always reading at least one work of fiction and one work of non-fiction simultaneously. Whatever mood I'm in, there's always a book nearby to suit it.
Rachel Nichols
#38. Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#39. I like reading a lot. Jeffrey Archer and Robert Ludlum are my favourite authors. I love making realistic cinema, so I read non-fiction more.
Madhur Bhandarkar
#40. 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
#41. Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever.
Jon Scieszka
#42. I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.
Sara Sheridan
#43. Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.
Robert Reed
#44. A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
Iain Banks
#45. Reading lets our mind visit new exciting worlds"
~Vianka Van Bokkem
Vianka Van Bokkem
#46. Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
Paul Theroux
#47. Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors
we hope
of your life come from reading fiction.
Orson Scott Card
#48. I believe we do well to fall asleep each night with books. We enter the library of our dreams in good company then.
Robert Stephen Parry
#49. I write for those who desire, not publication at any cost, but publication one can be proud of
serious, honest fiction, the kind of novel that readers will find they enjoy reading more than once, the kind of fiction likely to survive.
John Gardner
#50. Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable...
Stephen King
#51. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#52. I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I've read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it's the same.
Steven Wright
#53. The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.
Jeff VanderMeer
#54. Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting.
Susan Reynolds
#55. Paranormal fiction offers authors - and readers - the chance to answer the question, 'What if?' All the different ways that question can be answered make for extremely entertaining reading.
Jeaniene Frost
#57. For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um ... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something ... then yeah, they're old enough. LOL
Michelle M. Pillow
#58. Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.
Jennifer Haigh
#59. For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#60. When I'm reading for my own pleasure, I read things other than history or archival material. I read a lot of fiction. I'm very fond of mysteries.
David McCullough
#61. 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
#62. The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...
Bruno Bettelheim
#63. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.
Stephanie Perkins
#64. I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.
Kevin J. Anderson
#65. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open
the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
Jeanette Winterson
#67. Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
Charles Stross
#68. 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
#69. The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her.
Mary Papas
#70. But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that's one of the reasons we enjoy it.
Anthony Horowitz
#71. Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.
Peter Morgan
#72. I've always felt sad for people who don't read fiction; they only get to live one life.
Jack Tyler
#73. The unification of worlds is an author's priority, as one of them surely resides forbidden to the public.
P.A. Wunderlich
#74. I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it.
Isaac Hempstead-Wright
#75. I don't divide my reading into demographic categories, any more than I'd divide my friends into groups along ethnic or sexual lines. The thing I look for most is a sense of literary rawness - bareback fiction, if you will.
Christopher Fowler
#76. I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
Leni Zumas
#77. I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.
Alan Furst
#78. Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.
Kellyn Roth
#79. As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.
Michael Dirda
#80. Wishing you the best adventures in reading and in life!
Sass Cadeaux
#81. And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.
Lyndsay Faye
#82. I found out after reading quite a lot of it that it is not rated very high. He has a very descriptive way of writing but also lengthy. May not want to finish!!!!! This was his 1sr and only try ast Historical Fiction!
Wilkie Collins
#83. Reading is fuel for the brain. Writing is fuel for the spirit ...
Megan S. Johnston
#84. Perhaps this is why one reads fiction to begin with - to live a more interesting reality than one's daily life.
Steven Rigolosi
#85. Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf
#86. Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.
Amy Engel
#87. I didn't want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it's rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.
Jeanette Winterson
#88. I finally decided one day, reading science fiction magazines of the time, I could do at least as well as some of these people are doing. So I finally made a serious effort.
Fred Saberhagen
#89. When her mind was discomposed ... a book was the opiate that lulled it to repose.
Ann Radcliffe
#90. People who don't read fiction are scared of what's inside their own heads.
Carla H. Krueger
#91. All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.
Steve Almond
#92. Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.
Michael Dirda
#93. The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.
Paul Fry
#94. Secret Saturdays ought to be required reading at middle schools everywhere. Maldonado gives us both voice and heart. His young characters navigate a challenging world with endearing earnestness, lively style, and a heartening desire for true friendship and dignity.
E.R. Frank
#95. He had been inspired to start a career in the porn industry after reading the incredible tale of a Japanese man who avenged the death of his sister by going down on her best friend for seven days and seven nights.
Mark Jackman
#96. 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
#97. I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: 'Anthem,' by Ayn Rand; '1984,' by George Orwell; or 'Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley.
Sara Shepard
#98. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
Irvine Welsh
#99. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
Louis L'Amour
#100. As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
Norman Spinrad
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