Top 100 Great Fiction Quotes
#1. When our characters show us the full fire of that inner battle, we have the makings of great fiction. For whether the choice is ultimately for honor or dishonor, we will see the consequences and the reader will be instructed without being taught.
James Scott Bell
#3. Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
David Foster Wallace
#4. 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
#5. The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frederic Bastiat
#6. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
Eudora Welty
#7. Perhaps great fiction is in reality, deep hidden truths.
S.G. Savage
#9. Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth?
Jess Walter
#10. Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
Eudora Welty
#11. And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.
Karen Russell
#12. Day after day, week after week; writing great fiction takes time, emotion, skill and effort.
Carla H. Krueger
#13. I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.
James Wolcott
#14. Lying for lying's sake is the inspiration behind all great fiction.
Marty Rubin
#16. Jon Land writes great fiction, and Betrayal reads like the best of it. The fact that it's true makes the story all the more riveting ... A sobering indictment of our law enforcement system and one man's relentless quest to see justice done.
Robert Leuci
#17. Why did i so passionately require the truth? because all great fiction is true
Kinky Friedman
#18. Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination.
Charles Colson
#19. Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
Frederic Bastiat
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Great. I'd been dumped in Hell's waiting room.
Karen Chance
#23. They were magnificent all right, with the magnificence that can only grow in the ground of great foolishness.
Orna Ross
#25. I watch 2001: A Space Odyssey every time it's on. I made the kids watch it every time, too and now they just love watching it. Stanley Kubrick's great. And Blade Runner is one of my top three science fiction films. A lot of it has come true.
Bruce Willis
#27. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Stephen King
#28. I'm not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot.
Mark Goddard
#29. Words have great cumulative power, but in the 21st century, a single image is much stronger. An image suggests the unvarnished truth. That is its power and its fiction.
Alexandra Kerry
#30. I'm frustrated with Hollywood and television and the movies because they see science fiction as an excuse for eye candy, for lots of great special effects.
David Gerrold
#31. When shall we pass a day alone? I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love - but if you should deny me the thousand and first - 'twould put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.
John Keats
#32. Now, at last, she understood her great attraction to him. Here was the companion of her spirit. Here, indeed, was love.
Anne Rouen
#33. Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.
Varley O'Connor
#34. I'm not the best audience for that because I'm not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that.
Gary Oldman
#35. Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.
Michael LaRocca
#36. I can hear some of you groaning as you read this section. "Great," you're saying. "I have to put a theme in my book? Themes are only for that 'high literature' stuff that gets taught in universities, not for my nice, entertaining genre fiction.
Libbie Hawker
#37. 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
#38. I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.
Neil Gaiman
#39. Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.
T.K. Naliaka
#40. The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.
John Podhoretz
#41. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
#42. The great cause of fiction is to weave a bag to carry truth.
Penelope Wilcock
#43. IDEA .. if your bored and you miss me you should write some dirty fan fiction about us. you can read it to me later. great idea right?
Rainbow Rowell
#44. In science fiction, basic doubts featured prominently in the worlds of Philip K. Dick. I knew Phil for 25 years, and he was always getting onto me, a scientist. He was a great fan of quantum uncertainty, epistemology in science, the lot.
Gregory Benford
#45. Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
Orhan Pamuk
#46. It's a pity that the land of great leaders like Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka and Akbar, has to be led by a dummy PM. - Shruti Ranjan
Tuhin A. Sinha
#48. Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.
Rachel Kushner
#49. People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.
Mark Leyner
#50. We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.
John D. MacDonald
#51. I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.
Sam Weller
#52. I've been a fan of vampire fiction since way, way back - I loved Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Shirley Jackson, lots of great horror and paranormal fiction.
Rachel Caine
#53. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
Flannery O'Connor
#54. 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
#55. which has the power or quality of adding. The additory fiction gives to a great man a larger share of reputation than belongs to him, to enable him to serve some good end or purpose.Arbuthnot'sArt of political Lying.
Samuel Johnson
#56. That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.
Don DeLillo
#57. I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
Umberto Eco
#58. Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
Anita Brookner
#59. We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love.
Tim Farrington
#60. St John from the book of The Revelation
"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark.
Joseph M. Chiron
#61. 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
#62. I'm not a great reader of historical fiction; it's not my favourite genre.
Mal Peet
#63. For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
Diablo Cody
#64. To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.
Chris Womersley
#65. People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.
Anne Enright
#66. It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.
John Grisham
#67. There are lots of futurists that spend their whole life trying to figure out who we're going to be in 40, 50, 60, 100 years. That's the great thing about science fiction.
Jodie Foster
#68. I have found that those who try to shield us from the truth, regardless of the reason, end up doing the greatest harm. Truth alone sets you free, not lies and omissions.
Jessica Dotta
#69. 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
#70. Fiction is a great combination between experience and imagination.
Desi Puspitasari
#71. I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader.
Karin Slaughter
#73. Why is everything always my decision?" I asked.
Because you will not tolerate anything else."
Oh, I remembered now. "Great", I whispered.
- Anita to Jean-Claude
Laurell K. Hamilton
#74. I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.
Francois Mauriac
#75. I was a journalist, but I was starving. And I've written fiction, but I couldn't get a publisher. So, I was basically a very frustrated creative person working in advertising, and even there, I have a great idea that client won't buy it.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#76. I like to write stories that read like historical fiction about great, world-changing events through the lens of a flawed protagonist.
Carol Berg
#77. A few minutes later he texted her: 'IDEA .. if your bored and you miss me you should write some dirty fan fiction about us. you can read it to me later. great idea right?'
Cath smiled down at the phone stupidly.
Rainbow Rowell
#78. Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade.
K. Hari Kumar
#79. Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors
we hope
of your life come from reading fiction.
Orson Scott Card
#80. 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
#81. It is one of the great arts of the human soul," Ezekiel said to himself.
Her hand on the door, Quincy shifted and looked back at her uncle's profile. "What is?"
"Staying with someone. Companionship is one of the great arts of the human soul.
Beth Brower
#82. Books in general are great, but I'm a fiction lover, and I will continue to do it.
David Bergen
#83. Dead. Supposedly Suicide. That's how they'll kill Michael too. Make it look like a suicide or an accident of some sort.
H.C. Deboard
#84. In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby.
Parul Wadhwa
#85. The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money.
Aravind Adiga
#86. ...and from here I realized, with the deepest sense of my being, that we can erect and dismantle the great walls of the world, but we will only truly survive as a species when we dedicate ourselves to removing the walls from within.
Dawn Kohler
#87. A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying.
Lev Grossman
#88. I would like to do a science fiction film some day. Star Wars seems really to have destroyed the genre, which at one time offered great musical opportunities.
Carter Burwell
#89. Up to me. Great. I could hurt my mom and my sisters, or I could hurt my dad. Perfect. Isn't divorce fun?
Katherine Applegate
#90. It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days.
John Pipkin
#91. The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.
Lee Gutkind
#92. For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.
Norman Lock
#93. I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.
Robert Sheckley
#94. A little vanilla never hurt anybody." He nipped her ankle. "Great shoes by the way. Sexy as hell.
Hanna Lui
#95. IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#97. Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.
Jami Attenberg
#98. The great thing about growing up with science fiction is that you have an interest in everything.
Ray Bradbury
#99. I do a great deal of research. I don't want anyone to say, 'That could not have happened.' It may be fiction, but it has to be true.
Jacquelyn Mitchard
#100. What's great about teen fiction is that it's all mixed up - there's highbrow and lowbrow!
Kaui Hart Hemmings
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