Fiction The Quotes

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

Stephen King

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Two kinds of writers. One treats the world as if it were fiction; the other treats fiction as if it were the world.

Marty Rubin

#5. While the stories are fiction, the journey is real.

C.J. Peterson

#6. With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.

Kate Zambreno

#7. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]

Helen Dunmore

#8. In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

Robert Morgan

#9. In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in while I am creating it; then, as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, if, and to the extent that, they can.

Ayn Rand

#10. Romanticism demands mastery of the primary element of fiction: the art of storytelling - which requires three cardinal qualities: ingenuity, imagination, a sense of drama.

Ayn Rand

#11. In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with 'Dungeons and Dragons,' so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart.

China Mieville

#12. Black Jack. A common name for rogues and scoundrels in the eighteenth century. A staple of romantic fiction, the name conjured up charming highwaymen, dashing blades in plumed hats. The reality waled at my side.

Diana Gabaldon

#13. While researching my first book, I discovered so many fascinating tidbits that I wanted to share them with readers to remind them that while the book was fiction, the situations were based on historical realities - some of which were pretty hard to believe.

Julie Klassen

#14. But when it comes to fiction, the writer's only responsibility is to look for the truth inside his own heart.

Stephen King

#15. I do not allow fan-fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan-fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.

Anne Rice

#16. I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

Zadie Smith

#17. The sad thing is that, for many writers of fantasy fiction, the inclusion of magic seems to mean that logical ramifications and real-world laws both go out the window.

Jane Lindskold

#18. Unable to explore setting, conflict, characters or themes in their fiction, the mainstreamers wrote more and more eloquently about nothing at all.

Dave Wolverton

#19. Sinking into fiction: the if-only of if-onlys.

David Arnold

#20. 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

#21. To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.

Sheri S. Tepper

#22. 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

#23. At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

Nic Pizzolatto

#24. On 'Stranger Than Fiction,' the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page.

Marc Forster

#25. There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#26. Manners!" he said. "Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction. The castle is done. Do you like it?

Mark Twain

#27. The logical side of our brain convinces us that these events are all merely coincidences. Pure happenstance. That, The Legend of John Titor, must be wild-eyed fiction. The mind cannot accept any other conclusion as rational. Keep

E.A. Blayre III

#28. Lizzie Pepper is pure fiction! The character is pulled from tabloids. But I think we all look at celebrity marriages and invest in them.

Hilary Liftin

#29. As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction, The Silk Code delivers on its promises.

Gerald Jonas

#30. In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

Ben Bova

#31. If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear.

Kathleen Rooney

#32. Those who relish the study of character may profit by the reading of good works of fiction, the product of well-established authors.

Richard Whately

#33. Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

Virginia Woolf

#34. I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

Philip Sington

#35. The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#36. People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

Frederik Pohl

#37. For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.

Junot Diaz

#38. The American West is just arriving at the threshold of its greatness and growth. Where the West of yesterday is glamorized in our fiction, the future of the American West now is both fabulous and factual.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#39. Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid,

Anita Brookner

#40. I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

Stanley Elkin

#41. In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.

Damon Lindelof

#42. I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.

Daniel Woodrell

#43. But we all know books are fiction. The romance in novels is a crock of shit. Sometimes the hero still leaves in the end. And the heroine is once again left to pick up the pieces.

K. Bromberg

#44. Geoff Nelder's ARIA has the right stuff. He makes us ask the most important question in science fiction-the one about the true limits of personal responsibility.

Brad Linaweaver

#45. Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

Haruki Murakami

#46. Geoff Nelder inhabits Science Fiction the way other people inhabit their clothes.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood

#47. Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether

Theodore Sturgeon

#48. In fiction, the reader will make jumps with you. If you can make the reader make that leap with you, it's a thrilling moment for everyone.

William Lashner

#49. 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

#50. The Sword the burning decieved rising the science fiction the betrayed the spy the souls

Moira Young

#51. When it comes to creating compelling fiction, the devil may be in the details, but it is your imagination that ultimately allows your work to spread its wings and take flight. And fly it must. Only by soaring above the clouds of doubt can one truly achieve a suspension of disbelief

Max Hawthorne

#52. In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film.

James Kelman

#53. If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

Lawrence Block

#54. I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.

Edwidge Danticat

#55. I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.

Charles Stross

#56. Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth.

Hugh Miller

#57. For every work of fiction, the author inserts a bit of themself to make the story seem more real. For every work of nonfiction, the edges of reality must be blurred creatively to keep the reader's interest.

A.K. Wallace

#58. There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions - is he tall, is he short? - he had better quit.

Rex Stout

#59. When I started to write realistic, real fiction, the voices that were the strongest for me - the characters that I heard, the people that I knew - were the ones from my childhood.

Kenneth Bonert

#60. The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.

Michael Chabon

#61. There's two tiers of science fiction: the McDonalds sci-fi like Star Trek, where they have an adventure and solve it before the last commercial, and there are books that once you've read, you never look at the world the same way again.

David Gerrold

#62. Given that external reality
is a fiction, the writer's role
is almost superfluous. He
does not need to invent the
fiction because it is already
there.

J.G. Ballard

#63. This is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition.

Philip K. Dick

#64. There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.

Hari Kunzru

#65. I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Jonathan Lethem

#66. There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

Matt Haig

#67. I don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.

Elie Wiesel

#68. I like working closely with artists. I think that's very important in fantasy and science fiction - the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters.

Margaret Weis

#69. In fiction, the actions of a villain, even when unspeakable, can be cathartic to read about. They let us experience darkness, but add a safe remove.

Cassandra Clare

#70. Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.

Rachel Kushner

#71. What seems real one moment is fiction the next
and gone out of existence the moment after that.
Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth,
and change our only constancy.

David Budbill

#72. the recent novel by his wife Rebecca Goldstein, entitled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, subtitled A Work of Fiction). The

Jonathan Sacks

#73. It's fiction, the improbable is very probable in my worlds

H.Q. Frost

#74. The claim made by Team Obama that every dollar in stimulus translates into a dollar-and-a-half in growth is economic fiction. The costs of stimulus reduce future growth. No country has ever spent itself to prosperity. The price of stimulus has to be paid sometime.

Karl Rove

#75. I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it's less good than what I do, there's no point in reading it, if it's better than what I do it makes me depressed

Douglas Adams

#76. Once you realize that the imagination is non-fiction, the world is yours

Carl Henegan

#77. History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of fiction.

A.E. Samaan

#78. 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

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

Johannes Gouws

#80. 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

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

Neetesh Dixit

#82. 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

#83. 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

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

Ann Radcliffe

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

Flannery O'Connor

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

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

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

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

Peter Straub

#100. 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