Top 100 Literature Fiction Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.
Grace Paley
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.
Kurt Vonnegut
#6. Fantasy is the oldest form of literature and science fiction is just a new twist on it.
Katharine Kerr
#7. The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.
Will Christopher Baer
#8. The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.
Jon Spaihts
#9. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!
Jeff Hutchins
#10. You will come across people who always affirm by everything you say, but at the hour of need, they simply disappear! Stay away from such people or simply don't fall for their promises.
K. Hari Kumar
#11. At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.
Angela Carter
#12. Perfect," he groaned. "You are perfect." He sank his teeth into her ass, hard, drawing blood. "And now you wear my mark," he finished proudly. "Your ass is mine.
Hanna Lui
#13. If you have a big heart, you will live a large life.
Yvonne Jayne
#14. In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#15. Fantasy stories will always be popular, as there are always readers who are willing to escape, freely, to the worlds that the authors create, and spend time with the characters we give life to.
Jason Ellis
#16. The difference between an achiever and a loser is,
An achiever never gives up, never settles and lastly never forgets.
Akash Lakhotia
#17. They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.
'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.
John Gardner
#18. Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world," I said, "but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be - it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration.
Jasper Fforde
#19. When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.
Nalo Hopkinson
#20. Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.
James Wood
#21. 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
#22. The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.
Henry James
#23. Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.
Edmund White
#24. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#25. Time in the most powerful thing.
Not money, not power, not hope.
A person can have everything they
desire but without time they are,
all useless.
Akash Lakhotia
#26. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.
Fay Weldon
#27. As they walked, it seemed almost every building had some similar contrivance as decoration, adorning the street in a cacophony of clangs, bangs and whirs. The street's surroundings danced with steam and smoke, the scent of oil and grease its perfume.
A.F. Stewart
#28. The feeling, all encompassing, safe and warm like a blanket permanently draped over her shoulders, follows her around. She takes it into the shower, to meals with her mother and sister, to work as she reads out the news script, her voice never faltering.
Zainab Omaki
#29. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#30. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I
Harlan Ellison
#31. This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.
Mark Zero
#32. Calling one thing 'literature' and another 'fiction' is a way to create status where there is none.
Tucker Max
#33. For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.
Washington Irving
#34. I'm sure you can manage from here, and without a further word, he walked out of her room, then let himself out of her flat.
M.F. Roberts
#35. Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf
#36. A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.
Declan Kiberd
#38. I wake up and look at that bridge, try to count the red taillights I see heading east every morning, a kind of rosary as I pray for another crisis to dwarf the one defining us right now.
K.I. Hope
#39. Never run upstairs when someone's chasing you. Don't try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.
Mark Zero
#40. 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
#41. At 2:00 sharp on the afternoon of his internment, with his body resting in a casket in the front room of his home, the pallbearers--all bridge players--stuck a deck of cards in Mr. Hampton's cold hands, shut the lid over his head, and played bridge.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#42. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
#43. It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.
Paul Di Filippo
#44. My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
Frederik Pohl
#45. Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.
G.K. Chesterton
#46. The first time Kiya met Hapi was over a year ago. On that day, she was at the temple - not to sell pigeons and bread as usual, but to pray and offer sacrifices on the altar of Horus - the God of protection.
Mirette Baghat
#47. Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face.
Randolph Randy Camp
#48. Serving time doesn't make you fit to do anything but serve more time.
Donald Hays
#49. What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.
Orson Scott Card
#50. I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
Lafcadio Hearn
#51. Ari's words felt like drops of sunlight upon my skin, and my frame was burning with longing.
Petra March
#52. 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
#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. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
#55. I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times.
Bill Styron
#56. I want you forever. I will always be with you. I will always love you. I will love, honor, and cherish you for all eternity.
Katrina D. Miller
#57. But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#58. Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.
Tom Rachman
#59. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
#61. Books do pretend ... but squeezed in between is even more that is true - without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?
Matthew Pearl
#62. ...the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.
Toby Litt
#63. Amie frowned. 'That's what I can't figure out. I mean everyone wants their happy ending, right? No one cares about reading actual literature anymore anyway. All they want is vampires and supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It's sick, really.
Jennifer Silverwood
#65. Science fiction is the very literature of change.
Frederik Pohl
#66. Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.
Henry James
#67. Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.
Claire Colebrook
#68. A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated - as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.
Ayn Rand
#69. Christians are the salt of the earth ... Nothing grows where they've been.
Donald Hays
#71. A crowd began to gather round to watch the Heat begin.
They soon would learn which one would earn the famous Golden Fin!
The boards were tied to dolphin guides that pulled them like a sleigh
to what they called The Channel, every surfer's Dream Highway!
J.Z. Bingham
#72. The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.
Siri Hustvedt
#73. The problem was not an issue of availability because there were African girls everywhere. Christopher met them in church, in bars and in the cafeteria on the ground floor of the Sir Duncan Rice library.
Ayibu Makolo
#74. I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk
Joseph Zobel
#75. Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like.
Christina Westover
#76. Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.
R. Curtis Venture
#77. Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.
Edward Fahey
#78. In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it.
Frederick Lenz
#79. Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide.
Sharyn McCrumb
#80. Reading lets our mind visit new exciting worlds"
~Vianka Van Bokkem
Vianka Van Bokkem
#81. We would learn as much as we could, be as honourable as we could, be as courageous as we could, and be as happy as we could.
S.L. Mills
#82. I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
Dashiell Hammett
#83. To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.
Edward W. Said
#84. I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.
Mark Zero
#85. I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
Philip Pullman
#86. 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
#87. A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
Marisha Pessl
#88. The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.
E. M. Forster
#89. Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.
Ellen Glasgow
#90. Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.
Tom Shippey
#91. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography nor science fiction from being literature. Such
Georges Bataille
#92. As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.
Gregory Benford
#93. I've never met anyone as kind as you are, except me Mum, o' course." --Benjamin Trimmel to Lady Alexandra.
Lisa M. Prysock
#94. The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
Richard Dawkins
#95. We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness - the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.
Orson Scott Card
#96. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.
E. M. Forster
#97. One realizes the immortality of true love only after the lover dies
Kanza Javed
#98. A little vanilla never hurt anybody." He nipped her ankle. "Great shoes by the way. Sexy as hell.
Hanna Lui
#99. Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written.
Tessa Emily Hall
#100. I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?
Ernest Hemingway,
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