Top 100 Long Fiction Quotes
#1. Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#2. I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
Mohsin Hamid
#3. Specialize in small cast/single reader long fiction so I only compete against other podcasts of novels in that form.
Nathan Lowell
#4. 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
#5. Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night.
Peter Straub
#6. 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
#7. Magic is magic as long as humans can explain it logically!
Asse Sauga
#8. I want to be the best race horse around when I grow up, Mama.
You can be, Charlie, as long as you are willing to try your best and not give up when you have a bad day.
Deanie Humphrys-Dunne
#9. Then, the door opens and there he is; silhouetted in the hall light. Long hair, long legs, and a heartbeat in tune with my own.
Hunter S. Jones
#11. Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it.
Susanna Kearsley
#12. The sentient beast has long been a staple of fantasy fiction and its antecedents in myth and folktale.
Paul Di Filippo
#13. I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.
Corey Taylor
#14. Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet.
Vinton Cerf
#15. She did not realise that there could be a joy - a spiritual ecstasy- in the touch of a certain man, or that she would long for his touch with all her being
Anne Rouen
#16. I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction you're going to get bashed by critics.
John Grisham
#17. It takes a long time to write a book. I'm not going to spend that much time trying to deliver a message. The reason I do it is because I want to understand something myself. It's not a delivery device, it's an inquiry device. Didactic fiction to my mind never works. It backfires.
Ruth Ozeki
#18. I'll give you what you want, Sloane," he said. "What we both want. But think long and hard before you come to me. There are things that I like. Things that I want and expect from the woman in my bed. And I don't play by anyone's rules but my own.
J. Kenner
#19. Most of [her ashes] fell into the river in a long gray curtain. But some was caught by the wind and blown upward toward the blue spring sky where it swirled a moment in the air, before dissolving into sunlight.
Kimberly Cutter
#20. How long you been in the infantry, sir? Anything under ten miles counts as 'almost there'.
Henry V. O'Neil
#21. I launched 'Lightspeed' magazine in 2010, and from day one, we've had a strict mission to try to have gender parity in the magazine because that was the first hurdle that science fiction and fantasy have been dealing with for a long time.
John Joseph Adams
#23. It'd been a long time since they'd been together, but as close as they were physically, they'd never been so far apart in every other way.
Jennifer Faye
#24. To be different is a lonely thing, and she has been lonely for such a long time. What she does frightens people, and she thinks, "Why shouldn't they be frightened? It's not normal: no one else does what I can do.
Helen Bell
#25. Secrets, however long they are kept, usually still manage to be brought to light. The best you can hope for is that you'll be in control of when a secret gets out, not if it does."
-Melody in CHIMERA-
Vaun Murphrey
#26. For the first time in a long time a bit of something I was unfamiliar with crept up inside me.
If I hadn't known better, I'd have thought it was hope.
T.M. Frazier
#27. He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#28. I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.
Deborah Harkness
#29. One of the first rules the Emperor had drummed into her [Mara Jade] so long ago was to blend in as best she could with her surroundings
Timothy Zahn
#30. When they're together, the world could fall apart around them and they'd never notice or care as long as they have each other.
About Alex and Brittany.
Simone Elkeles
#31. We live in a science fiction universe. We have done for a long time.
Terry Pratchett
#32. I recognized Meg's swirly handwriting and crooked my index finger into the side of the envelope to rip it open. There was no letter. Just a picture.
A picture of Meg holding a picture of me.
The word HOME echoed through my body like a rifle shot.
Laura Anderson Kurk
#34. I knew that it was impossible for us to be kept apart for too long.
Erica Sehyun Song
#35. She studied my face for a long minute. "Are you going to help my mom?" It was a simple question. But how do you tell a child that things just aren't that simple, that some questions don't have simple answers
or any answer at all?
Jim Butcher
#36. Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that's a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away.
Leonard Susskind
#37. Lucretia Jane Price. A sweet name for a sweet lady that smelled of roses, spoke with a sweet drawl, and was surely made of all the sweet country things a man who hadn't eaten a good meal in a long time could imagine
molasses, sweet peas, sweet corn, freshly churned butter.
Linda Leigh Hargrove
#38. Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.
Storm Jameson
#39. It is a very difficult thing, to love another.
To some it comes easily, naturally even. Whilst for others, the road to such things is long and arduous and fraught with danger.
Ross Turner
#40. But what the hell, I thought as I lay there in the dark. It could be souls rot away with the body, too. What did anything matter in the long run anyway, except memories? And they only lived on in corpses that couldn't talk.
Will Viharo
#41. Books can be viewed as food for the mind
Stop reading and your brain can become anemic
Read junk and your thinking can become malnourished
But handle your diet with books well and your life long learning never stops
Jonathan Frakes
#42. My grandfather allowed as how I might even live long enough to see a Mars landing. I haven't, of course, except in fiction, including my own, and strongly doubt that I ever will.
Pamela Sargent
#43. I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.
Tananarive Due
#44. Looks like my superpowers don't come with automatic manicures, thank heaven. I hate long nails.
Jennifer Silverwood
#45. Key to all fiction, long or short, is to remember that the wolfman did not want the moon.
Ron Carlson
#46. It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.
Deborah Eisenberg
#47. People read legal writing differently. When you're at the crux of a legal argument, every step is a step in the argument. The judge will see any holes. If you do that in fiction, it's too long and boring.
William Lashner
#48. After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.
Edwidge Danticat
#49. Long dismissed as children's stories or 'myths' by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.
Karl-Erik Sveiby
#50. In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
Victor LaValle
#51. My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story.
Philip Schultz
#52. There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped towards new ends.
Arthur C. Clarke
#53. Brother, when you've been here as long as I have, you'll come to discover there are only one or two essential things worth living for. Unique to you and you alone. My honor is one of them for me. I keep my honor by keeping the relic out of their hands.
Brodi Ashton
#54. At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen.
Gillian Flynn
#55. He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his balding pate.
Patricia Cornwell
#56. Biking up the same mile-and-a-half long asphalt hill is so much harder when I know that at the end of the journey I'll either be an outlaw, or I'll be dead.
E.J. Squires
#57. We each have our lives ... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.
Kevin J. Anderson
#58. He is dressed in a long, white robe and in his hand is a white cap. I draw up as he passes down the hall; he does not see me. Shortly I hear a horse leaving. There is much I do not know about him, but tonight I know one of his secrets. He is a midnight rider.
Nancy B. Brewer
#59. I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.
Ellen Potter
#60. You wanted us all back together again! Bonnie shouted at Caroline, and pulled the scandalized girl into the dance. Meredith, her dignity forgotten, joined them too.
And for a long time in the clearing there was only rejoicing.
L.J.Smith
#61. For a long time, I missed being in the courtroom every day. I missed trial work. It was so much a part of my life. It was what I did and who I was. But over the years I did find the opportunity to realize my childhood dream of writing crime fiction.
Marcia Clark
#62. It is true that I didn't write any poetry between 1995 and 2011. The reason for this was probably because I had stayed away from fiction for so long and couldn't tear myself away from it.
Yuriy Tarnawsky
#63. I did an album a long time ago called 'Replicas,' which was entirely science-fiction driven, or science-fantasy. Since then it's been a song here, a song there. It's not really a constant theme. I've written far more about my problems with religion, with God and all that.
Gary Numan
#64. I found I could only glance at him for tiny moments and then I had to look away. He was perfect enough to hurt my feelings for a long time, and I wanted to let him.
Laura Anderson Kurk
#65. Well, they've come a long way. To think that he now could access a secret document held in the Vatican archives, via electronic technology.
Peter J. Tanous
#66. She realized in an instant that being around him awakened her, stirring the sediment that had long ago settled at the bottom of her well. He made her feel a part of him, of something larger, and somehow more alive.
Luna Saint Claire
#67. Carlos, are we in complete understanding with each other?"
"Yeah," I say. "As long as it's not in your house and you don't know about it, you're okay with us messin' around."
"I know you're joking with me. You are joking with me, aren't you?"
"Maybe.
Simone Elkeles
#68. Calling a piece of short fiction a "tale" removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales.
Margaret Atwood
#69. Christopher was wearing a suit and adorned make-up. As long as I had known him, he never wore a suit or make-up. The look of him defenseless to his appearance saddened me.
Brian Joyce
#70. Kara knew all he recognized was T and A on a string and he was nothing more than a sleazy puppeeter , so long as there were souls for sale he was ready to buy ..
Saira Viola
#71. You need only one thing in the world. It is not money. It is not fame. It is not even food. All you need in the world is hope. As long as you have that, you have everything. This is your birthright that you should never lose. If you keep hope, all your other necessities will come soon enough.
Ilchi Lee
#72. Join us next time for Days of the Undead when Rachel learns her long lost brother is really a crown prince from outer space.
Kim Harrison
#73. The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.
Chad Harbach
#74. I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.
Sue Monk Kidd
#75. As a kid I was enamored with fiction, most of it utterly forgettable and long forgotten.
Andrew Bacevich
#76. I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.
Jennifer Egan
#77. The negative attitudes toward the genres - romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. - are fallout from the academic world's long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology.
Jayne Ann Krentz
#78. The embrace was long and tight, but more like a complex language then a simple prolonged act. She said nothing at all, but damn she said everything. And I finally got it.
Pierce Minor
#79. What's broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live ... I'm too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.
Margaret Mitchell
#80. If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest ... she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.
Ned Rorem
#81. She would keep playing the role of the winner as long as the audience believed her.
Mary Papas
#82. It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe.
Margaret Atwood
#83. God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.
Surely, while we live we are not lost.
Oh Janos, Janos my brother!
Surely we are not lost
while we live.
John Hepworth
#84. I felt my heart warm up and become pliable in a way that I hadn't felt in far too long, and I knew in that moment that the thaw had happened because I was finally surrendering.
Kimberly Stuart
#85. Like I've told you before, Beverly, I don't care where we live as long as we're together." Vance ... "The Elder Effect
D.L. Given
#86. You need to understand that truth is stranger than fiction. Listen: people are willing to swallow any old tripe as long as you say it without flinching. They want to be told stuff. And they don't want to doubt you either. It's too hard.
Craig Silvey
#87. I've read pretty broadly on the Holocaust - both fiction and non-fiction - and to me, 'The Lost Wife' is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.
Lauren Weisberger
#88. I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.
Hanya Yanagihara
#89. My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#90. Hell has been cloaked in folklore and disguised in fiction for so long, many people deny the reality of such a place.
Billy Graham
#91. There was a tempest brewing in his eyes that I wasn't sure I would survive if I stayed in his gaze too long. But he told me with his sure hold that I could trust him and not to run before I'd given him a chance to show him what it was like to ride out the storm.
Shelly Crane
#92. Truth is stranger than fiction because lies are much more convincing but the truth always comes out no matter how long it takes.
Sanjo Jendayi
#93. My eyes refuse to let him leave, but he stands still holding my hand, lingering for as long as possible.
Thomas Sweeney
#94. Men are accustomed to making objective assessments of devastating situations, as long as they are not immersed in them. Rare is he who maintains objectivity in the midst of personal affliction.
Michael D. O'Brien
#95. Reluctantly, we had already accepted every challenge at the moment we were born. And as long as we live, we have no right to give up. For we, or at least someone very similar to us, already died once, long ago in a faraway place.
Jeno Marz
#96. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.
Douglas Adams
#97. I think love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.
Peter S. Beagle
#98. Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.
Floyd Skloot
#99. For me, fiction isn't very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it's a whole different thing - whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily. It can do emotional stuff. But they don't really compare - not for me.
John Darnielle
#100. So long as we do not depend on the facts entirely, incomplete knowledge is better than complete ignorance.
Egwene al'Vere
Brandon Sanderson
