Top 100 Important Fiction Quotes
#1. Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.
Neil Gaiman
#3. An important feature of good characterization in a novel is that the characters are dimensionalized and are not all of one piece. Human beings, as Singer noted, have contradictions.
Joseph Telushkin
#4. Fiction is very, very important," he said, his voice is rising. "Storytelling is how people learn. You get people to understand new cultures and other lives through stories. Made-up stories. Fiction.
Kristine Grayson
#5. The power of fiction is a great thing. But, after all, reality is just a little more important.
S.A. Tawks
#6. What's more important than recycling? Producing something to recycle.
Gordon Osmond
#7. It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes.
Jeanette Winterson
#8. In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts ... It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that's quite important ... truth with fiction.
Janet Leigh
#9. These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe's world.
Lavie Tidhar
#10. The mistakes we make when we are young are just as important to us as food or air. Without learning how to do things the wrong way, we can never learn how to do them the right way.
J.A. Brimingham
#11. Ugh! She cursed her lack of attention to the [mythology] reading. Who could have known that would be the important class?
Joannah Miley
#12. I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me.
Lisa Alther
#13. 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
#14. There's a good feeling about them. It's something I like to find in fiction. So many writers master form and technique, but get so little feeling into their work. I think that's important.
A. Scott Berg
#15. You're also finding out something as you read that will be vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this: THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT. Fiction
Neil Gaiman
#16. 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
#17. Reality is such a pain. Those of us who were fed up with that kind of reality decided to remake it. We'd set up a partition, separate what's important to us from what was trash, put only the things we loved on our side, and got rid of the rest.
Ryohgo Narita
#18. Humans are strange. ... They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important - that they are important. ... it's vanity.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#19. How can I be more important than someone else? Isn't every life important?
Shelley K. Wall
#20. Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don't get it. It's amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together'
'Yeah, well, that's a whole different thing.'
(from Honey Pie)
Haruki Murakami
#21. What you do today is important . We can never get today back.
Christine Handy
#22. One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.
Matthew Pearl
#23. Iculous because at his age he had not enjoyed
that which all fiction taught him was the most important
thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things
as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed
too terribly from the ideal of his dreams.
W. Somerset Maugham
#24. Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.
Umberto Eco
#25. I've always felt that no one understands why some books of non-fiction endure and some don't, because there's not much understanding among many non-fiction writers that the narrative is terribly important.
Robert Caro
#26. The illusion that power lies within the hands of the common man is more important than legitimate efficiency within the government.
Evan Meekins
#27. I was his heartbeat. I was his fucking universe.
Now I was, but soon I wouldn't be.
I would miss that, miss being important.
I would miss having someone.
Lisa Henry
#28. There's a horrible fallacy that exists in the popular discussion of fiction these days: the idea that a successful central character need be 'likeable' or 'sympathetic'. It is surely more important that they be human, no? More crucial that they breathe?
Andrew O'Hagan
#29. Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.
Alix Kates Shulman
#30. No, I thought. No way. I love her too much. I would never do that. And then again, those two words, her voice, exploding inside my head: "Tyler, wait!
Amy Hatvany
#31. I liked journalism and thought it was important, certainly more important than fiction. I'd probably still be doing it if I hadn't been elbowed out.
Jim Crace
#32. Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
Paul Auster
#33. Last, but not least
in fact, this is most important
you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.
Satyajit Ray
#34. A very important function of intelligence is the ability to premeditate. ~ Aarush Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
#35. I love science fiction, always have, always will. But it's the kind of science fiction that I love which I think is an important distinction.
Matthew S. Williams
#36. For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.
Gene Roddenberry
#37. While parchment may burn and gold may be stained or melted down, the things that are truly important to us will never lose their value.
Evan Meekins
#38. I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
#39. One of the things I've been talking about with my critical writing and my own work is that these movies are seen differently in a theatrical space. It's very important to me. I edit films to be seen theatrically, like fiction material I've worked on like Listen Up Phillip or other documentaries.
Robert Greene
#40. Why do you assume I'm human?
I wasn't born; I was created just like this.
First I was an idea.
Then I came into being, charged with a very important task.
I've come to find the monster.
Eliza Granville
#41. It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.
Jacqueline Winspear
#42. Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.
Geoffrey Wood
#43. I am a firm believer that the challenges we endure in life evolve us to be the peole we become. I have learned that life is what you make of it, what you do is important, work shouldn't become your life, and you should enjoy life as God hands it to you.
Vickie L. Peach Wilkins
#44. People responded to body language without even thinking. It was important to get it absolutely right.
Sara Sheridan
#45. For us, the playground of fiction is just as important as reality
Ryohgo Narita
#46. It's important to have a buddy like that. Somebody who'll stop you from doing that really stupid thing you were gonna do just because you couldn't think of anything better.
unidentified soldier, eulogizing his dead buddy
Henry V. O'Neil
#47. The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.
Lynn Coady
#48. For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten "toptypsical" meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite.
Philip Kitcher
#49. I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you've just bricked something important because you didn't pay enough attention to a loose wire.
Randall Munroe
#50. I take it you know my companion?"
Oh,yes!" said Savage, his smile disappearing. "We know all about Ruby Journey. Please don't let her kill anyone important. Or set fire to anything."
Your reputation precedes you," Random said dryly to Ruby.
Simon R. Green
#51. 'Watchmen' is not only the greatest comic ever written, it's a really important work of fiction.
Gerard Way
#52. I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.
Jim Shepard
#53. My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.
David Edelstein
#54. Amelia nodded her head, "That makes perfect sense."
"No is doesn't," jeered Otto.
"Yes, it does," sighed Amelia. "Don't you ever remember anything important?"
"Of course, I remember how many Star Trek seasons there were and when the Three Stooges were born!
Monet Polny
#55. I guess what's most important is that we chose to live with our hearts open and to let our experiences show us the way towards our brightest days.
Brian Joyce
#56. I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma ... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Toni Morrison
#57. This is important. Money on its most basic level is a hard fact - you either have it or you don't. But on it's emotional level it is purely a fiction. It becomes what you let it become.
Kent Nerburn
#58. She had wanted more than she could have.
She had wanted him, and more ... she had wanted him to want her.
In the name of something bigger than tradition, bolder than reputation, more important than a silly title.
Sarah MacLean
#59. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.
Kurt Vonnegut
#60. Aw honey. Today's as important as forever." Grandpa Joe in "Shave and a Haircut" Flash Warden and Other Stories
Eileen Granfors
#61. Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.
Arundhati Roy
#62. Cross-pollination and "contamination" is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.
Jeff VanderMeer
#63. It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
Thomas Perry
#64. The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.
Joyce Carol Oates
#65. I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.
Dale Peck
#66. In life, you will hear many fantastical and astounding things, what is important is sorting out the fact from the fiction.
T.B. Christensen
#67. Regardless of my age, such a trivial thing isn't important, it was upon that decision which my life hung.
Ross Turner
#68. My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
Iain Banks
#69. Read this book ... but understand it's fiction. And let life be ... your most important addiction.
John Zelazny
#70. Mai whispers, "Why did she have to leave? When she was there, I knew where I had her; she was safe."
"You of all people," Nicholas says, "should know that freedom is more important than being safe.
E.J. Squires
#71. There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.
Julia Glass
#72. It is important for a woman to have the duplicity to make good use of whatever gifts she might have, however valueless they might seem... You have to have the inner strength to pursue your goal, and not care how many enemies you make along the road. It is not easy.
Anne O'Brien
#73. Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.
Theodore Sturgeon
#74. I don't think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what's the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.
Percival Everett
#75. To describe a kiss is to describe a diary entry or a pair of underwear - each is personal and private, slightly awkward. Very awkward. But necessary.
Caroline George
#76. If you want to talk about a subject that is important to women, romantic fiction is the place to talk about it because that's where your audience is.
Charlotte Lamb
#77. As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics.
Kathleen Rooney
#78. [Science fiction's] most important use, I submit, is a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged.
Kingsley Amis
#79. The Israel stories were really hard for me to write, because I think that my book is very much about politics, but it isn't political. It really was important for me to not have a political agenda at all, because I have a hard time stomaching any political fiction that feels message-y.
Molly Antopol
#80. Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot - but not twice.
Diana Gabaldon
#81. One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.
Richard M. Weaver
#82. That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.
Ben Lerner
#83. Sex is like God, really. I know they're both important, but if I think about them too much my head hurts." -The Best Kept Secret
Wendi Nunnery
#84. It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.
Neil Gaiman
#85. I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
Peter Ackroyd
#86. In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character.
In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world.
Jo Walton
#87. When I was younger, when I was at school, I did read a lot of fiction. I think as you get older perhaps you're interested in essays and biographies and things like that. I think it's just important to just read as much as you can.
Ronald Frame
#88. What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
Chris Bohjalian
#89. Spreadsheets are fiction. Believing in what you're doing and what you're building is what's important.
Vinod Khosla
#90. Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
Alan Lightman
#91. It was important to tell people. To let people know that this can happen. Your child's body can stop. Stop breathing, stop beating.
Sarah Moss
#92. Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.
Michael Crichton
#93. The most important thing you can ever know, is that whatever your purpose is, that's not your only choice.
Dan Wells
#95. I think teaching keeps me honest because if I'm up in front of a class talking about what I think is important about fiction while knowing I myself have just failed to do that hours earlier at my computer - it's a good and humbling reminder.
Aimee Bender
#96. Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.
Hilary Mantel
#97. Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.
Sara Sheridan
#98. I enjoy the writings of all of these authors and they have been very inspirational for me. But I think that it is important as writers of metaphysical, New Age, occult fiction and nonfiction to not take ourselves too seriously.
Frederick Lenz
#99. There is a saying: 'The child is parent to the adult', which means whatever happens to you as a child or teenager affects the adult you become. You are forged in your history. And fiction is an incredibly important force in shaping children, and that's why fiction needs to be diverse.
Malorie Blackman
#100. To successfully tell the story, we had to be willing to let people see us as we really were; with all our weaknesses, fears, and imperfections. There are important lessons we learned from the experience that we would not have adequately relayed to the reader if we had been less bold." ~ Duane
Duane & Selena Pannell
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