Top 39 General Fiction Quotes
#1. The primary goal of publishing general fiction and non-fiction was never profit - though profit was essential to stay in the game. Publishing is a vocation in which the work is its own reward, an insufficient goal for today's conglomerates.
Jason Epstein
#2. General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
Marvin Minsky
#3. I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.
Aldous Huxley
#5. I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
George Saunders
#6. Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.
Oliver Sacks
#7. In general, Americans would walk a mile uphill in the rain to avoid pain, unless the walk could be shorter and level and the day sunny, which they'd prefer.
Geoffrey Wood
#8. Whenever I hear someone make a highly improbable assumption, I always ask, "What's your second choice?
Tom Haikin
#9. I don't think there is enough respect in general for the time it takes to write consistently good fiction. Too many people think they will master writing overnight, or that they are as good as they will ever be.
Tananarive Due
#10. I'm too old to be ignorant as I am."
--Twelve-year-old Gabriella to the general, who does not want her to know about Emmett Till and the world's brutality.
Elle Thornton
#11. We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.
Edwidge Danticat
#12. Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
Raymond Queneau
#13. Vanity's contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labour and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted into Fiction with an apologetic 'gosh, don't know how that happened'.
Jasper Fforde
#14. I am the prosecutor. I represent the state. I am here to present to you the evidence of a crime. Together you will weigh this evidence. You will deliberate upon it. You will decide if it proves the defendant's guilt.
Scott Turow
#15. The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue and confirmed by every look till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel and consent to yield to the general delusion.
Samuel Johnson
#16. fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.
Ken Liu
#17. Granted, I'm more interested in technology than most people, and less interested in politics than most. But I don't like to think about categories. I really see myself as a general non-fiction writer.
James Gleick
#18. As a general rule, you won't find the love of your life while you're on your knees under a table.
Helios Dayspring
Belinda McBride
#19. It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
Nicola Chiaromonte
#20. I love the fact that it's not only about Star Trek, but about science fiction in general, and science.
Rene Auberjonois
#22. Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.
Etgar Keret
#23. In general, I write for ages 12 and up - although I've received emails from readers between the ages of seven and seventy. My books are science fiction.
Marie Lu
#24. Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.
Jeff VanderMeer
#25. Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.
Stephen Hawking
#26. The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.
Samuel R. Delany
#27. Any resemblance to real events, actual persons, or reality in general is entirely coincidental.
Scott Michael Decker
#28. I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories - and maybe this is a little bit off-topic - but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms.
Lorin Stein
#29. Books in general are great, but I'm a fiction lover, and I will continue to do it.
David Bergen
#30. But in general, who's to say what's not gay enough? And how do we even raise that question without raising the far more perilous one of, Is it too gay?
Christopher Rice
#31. My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.
George Steiner
#32. Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.
Ellen Glasgow
#33. Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.
Tim O'Brien
#34. I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
Don DeLillo
#35. I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.
David Eddings
#36. We're more interested in the editor of this Astounding Science Fiction. General Groves sent me to ask that someone who knows more about this work you're doing interview this" - he glanced at a card - "John W. Campbell.
Gregory Benford
#37. 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
#38. Fiction should be specific rather than general, because people are specific.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#39. The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.
Tony Kushner
