Fiction The Quotes

#1. Our lover is the sun, and we the stars forever floating in their glow. We push and push, yearning for our sun's rays to reach out and touch us for just a moment in time ... one second-glance to warm our spirits and soothe our aching hearts.

Katlyn Charlesworth

#2. If you want to be a good lair, tell people what they want to hear. (From Hot dogs under The Dakota)

Johannes Gouws

#3. Perhaps no one religion contains all the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together. Or perhaps the elves are right and there are no gods. But how can I know for sure?" - Pg 479 Brisingr

Christopher Paolini

#4. Each Fable is inspired by some true stories which doesn't have an happy ending, unlike the Fable.

Neetesh Dixit

#5. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Jess Walter

#6. Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

Umberto Eco

#7. When her mind was discomposed ... a book was the opiate that lulled it to repose.

Ann Radcliffe

#8. For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

Flannery O'Connor

#9. As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.

Stephen King

#10. 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

#11. It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.

Mal Peet

#12. 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

#13. But the living must fear death, or they would not struggle to stay alive.

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

#14. A true master will not deceive an able disciple. You are hampered by the limits you set and no limit can be set on skill.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

#15. The bleakest situations bring out the hospitality in all of us, but it's during the harshest we find out how strong we really are.

Evan Meekins

#16. 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

#17. When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.

Sophie Hannah

#18. I don't mean to take the bow off the end of your rain, but you gotta be smart about your first boyfriend.

C. Kennedy

#19. I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition 's shown; And all that history, much that fiction weaves.

Charles Lamb

#20. There was no point in the gods trying to separate us. Whether we were on Earth or in hell, we'd spend the rest our days look for the other.

Taisha DeAza

#21. Although the villagers rose with the sun to work the fields, attend to the animals, bake their bread, and begin their long list of chores, for me, Leya Truelong, this was a day like no other. Today, Wren River was touched by the fantastic.

Desiccate by Bonnie Ferrante

Bonnie Ferrante

#22. I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.

Jeff Kinney

#23. Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night.

Peter Straub

#24. The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.

Robert Jordan

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. There's one thing I want you to do for me."
"Anything." He pleaded.
"When you're all alone, sitting in the silence behind bars, separated from your freedom. Ask yourself. Was it worth it?" She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.

Michelle Umland

#28. I've never been able to understand 'faith' myself, nor to see how a just God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion out of an infinitude of false ones - by faith alone. It strikes me as a sloppy way to run an organization, whether universe or a smaller one.

Robert A. Heinlein

#29. Shut the front door!" Jenna exclaimed.
Andrew disappeared into the foyer, and when he returned, his eyebrows were furrowed in confusion. "The door is shut?

Laura Kreitzer

#30. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.

Edward Abbey

#31. I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It's my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories.

Nicholas Trandahl

#32. My fiction is reviewed by the mainstream press, by science fiction periodicals, romance magazines, small press publications and various other journals, including some usually devoted to archaeological and other science material.

Jean M. Auel

#33. The unification of worlds is an author's priority, as one of them surely resides forbidden to the public.

P.A. Wunderlich

#34. It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

H.P. Lovecraft

#35. My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#36. The world is full of sluts on skates. From Penn-warren's "All the Kings Men.

Martha Miller

#37. I gravitated to Judy Blume early on. 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing' was my favorite, with a realistic and relatable protagonist in Peter Hatcher. When I reached the fourth grade, I made the leap to science fiction and never looked back.

Jeff Kinney

#38. The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can't stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can't stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it.
At least surgeons and prizefighters get to wear gloves

Mike Bartos

#39. The sea was my first home ... Now that I had nowhere else to go, this was the last place I felt safe.

Jennifer Silverwood

#40. I'm a fan of short horror fiction ... in fact, the most memorable horror I've read is of the short variety ... but I have a hard time pulling it off myself.

George Stephen

#41. It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.

Max Barry

#42. 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

#43. There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.

Henry Miller

#44. In every other science fiction series, humans are at the top of the food chain. In the 'Babylon 5' universe, they're in the bottom third.

J. Michael Straczynski

#45. Do you know why our race is doomed, Pellinore? Because it has fallen in love with the pleasant fiction that we are somehow above the very rules that we have determined govern everything else.

Rick Yancey

#46. Is it painful?" the groundskeeper asked. "I am asking for science.

John Scalzi

#47. If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.

Jamaica Kincaid

#48. Science-fiction fans are the most loyal fans in the world. It's true. They'll watch things that you actually should give them their money back for

Katee Sackhoff

#49. Sex was the main component of her thoughts now. But love - and her desperate longing for it - had vanished from her heart like a migraine after a painkiller.

Augustine Sam

#50. The physiological effects of an electrocution are severe and painful. Besides launching the body into violent convulsions, the electrocution of a human being causes massive destruction throughout the body.

Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

#51. I'm not really a science-fiction fan, I quite like the idea of getting away from the science-fiction side of it, for two episodes. It was lovely, it was a super story and great fun.

Sarah Sutton

#52. It's the first instance where I believe that it might actually be wrong, the first time I feel like a bit of a creep.

Siobhan Davis

#53. In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.

Ray Bradbury

#54. the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact.

Whitley Strieber

#55. No matter how many miles I move away, my love will always remain within the boundary of your heart
Lines from Love Vs Destiny ...

Atul Purohit

#56. The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.

John Updike

#57. I think the highest purpose of fiction is to show that all people are fundamentally worthy of mercy.

Tom Bissell

#58. When the world uncovers some dark disguise,
Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.

Thomas Ligotti

#59. But the task of science fiction is not to predict the future. Rather, it contemplates possible futures.

Anonymous

#60. 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

#61. I want to be the best race horse around when I grow up, Mama.
You can be, Charlie, as long as you are willing to try your best and not give up when you have a bad day.

Deanie Humphrys-Dunne

#62. About the time you might start to think that science fiction - the real stuff, not the species of fantasy that goes under the name - is really dead, along comes a story by Cory Doctorow.

Lois Tilton

#63. 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

#64. Every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

Hilary Mantel

#65. So you're the little smart ass from Poleglass.
I wanted to point out he sounded like Dr. Seuss but bit my lip and remembered the warning the old lady gave me.

David Louden

#66. That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.

Anthony Holden

#67. My memories came back like a punch in the face. Only good.

Lee Davidson

#68. Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

Katherine Paterson

#69. I knew revenge like the ghost of an old friend." ~ #1001

Pippa DaCosta

#70. People realize that Salieri is not the man we saw in the Amadeus movie. That man had no talent. It was a great movie, but the Salieri character was a big fiction.

Cecilia Bartoli

#71. As far as I'm concerned, you're changing the fate of another human being. Maybe he isn't meant to be elected to office. Maybe humans deserve to live with electing the wrong person.

Evette Davis

#72. I believe,' Muswell once said, 'that mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the reverberations of the infinity that torments us.
("The White Hands")

Mark Samuels

#73. In the 1950s, we had all these B-grade science-fiction movies. The point was to scare the public and get them to buy popcorn. No attempt was made to create movies that were somewhat inherent to the truth.

Michio Kaku

#74. I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

Wally Lamb

#75. One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.

Kathy Reichs

#76. They say you can never step into the same river twice. And maybe that's how it was for Papi now, memories shifting and re-forming soundlessly beneath him while the rest of us sat on the shore and watched.

Sarah Ockler

#77. A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.

Robert A. Heinlein

#78. He'd promised her forever, but now that there was another option, would he want to take it? He'd said not, but Bessina had butterflies taking up residence in her stomach at the thought. She had to know for sure.

Inger Iversen

#79. I'm an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn't matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.

Reid Scott

#80. Then, the door opens and there he is; silhouetted in the hall light. Long hair, long legs, and a heartbeat in tune with my own.

Hunter S. Jones

#81. She pulls her hand away and Damian feels the sensation of falling, a somersault into a foreign abyss where a girl with eggplant hair and a hoop in her brow waits in the darkness.

Christy A. Campbell

#82. 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

#83. The Devil loved watching children pour down the front steps of the high school like lava from a volcano. Trolling for souls. He posed in one of his favorite guises today, a school bus driver.

Serena Schreiber

#84. During the day she would read science fiction novels. In the evenings she watched television. And she ate, and ate, and drank, and ate.

Fay Weldon

#85. Why might not the world WHICH CONCERNS US - be a fiction?

Friedrich Nietzsche

#86. I'd never seen that look on another face before, had never identified it in another person. I'd only met with it in fiction. But everyone falls in love with Holden Caulfield when they're sixteen. They read Catcher in the Rye and don't feel so alone.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

#87. Only in California could the night air be lit not by fireflies, but radioactive porn star cumshots.

C.Z. Hazard

#88. This is the Rock, sweetheart," the owner added. "There's no tragedy you can't profit from.

Henry Mosquera

#89. She and I are as far apart as the stars in the sky and the soles of my feet." Detective Sean Ryan ~Deception on Sable Hill by Shelley Gray

Shelley Gray

#90. In favor of southern womanhood as much as anybody, but not for preserving polite fiction at the expense of human life.

Harper Lee

#91. Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.

Tyler Cowen

#92. 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

#93. It was only much later that he was made flesh and blood [in the Gospels] on paper. Thus Christ was created as a literary creation.

Paul Louis Couchoud

#94. The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.

Simon Schama

#95. Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.

Daniel Keyes

#96. I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

Rachel Kushner

#97. The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.

C. Kennedy

#98. 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

#99. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.

Saul David

#100. Once a man is truly dead and carried pale and cold across the Styx--once Old Bones has put an arm about his shoulders and walked him through the Gate into Darkness--might Science yet summon him back?

Ian Weir