Top 49 Modern Fiction Quotes
#1. There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.
Nick Harkaway
#2. It allows you to say things that sound very dramatic and get away with it. If you had characters in modern fiction say the same things as they're driving down the street in an Oldsmobile they'd sound ludicrous!
Terry Goodkind
#3. I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.
Henry Rollins
#4. I don't like super-descriptive modern fiction. I like, "Here's what was happening in 1582 all over the planet." Then that gets my imagination going.
Andrew Bird
#5. By all the rules of modern fiction there should have been gunsmoke mingling its acrid blue with the brown haze of corral dust. Dead men should have fallen and been trampled ...
Nothing of this sort happened.
B.M. Bower
#6. She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word 'escape' used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.
Alice Munro
#7. The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.
Richard K. Morgan
#8. I started the movement of SF in America in 1908 through my first magazine, 'MODERN ELECTRICS.' At that time it was an experiment. Science fiction authors were scarce. There were not a dozen worth mentioning in the entire world
Hugo Gernsback
#9. Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us.
Isaac Asimov
#10. If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#11. You can't even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#12. I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.
J.G. Ballard
#13. Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?
Jill Ker Conway
#14. The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum.
Sara Sheridan
#15. In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance.
Michael Dirda
#16. Jane sneezed three hundred dollars' worth of coke into the air.
Krishna's black eyes seem to have mirrors in them. She glances at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat's.
Anthea Carson
#17. In post-modern finance, everybody took a risk when lending or borrowing.
B. Barmanbek
#18. The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.
Jill Lepore
#19. The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
Tom Wolfe
#20. Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.
Michael Montoure
#21. I'm a science fiction author at heart, and what I like about the Cthulhu Mythos setting is that, at its core, it is horror science fiction. I can take ideas from modern theoretical science, manipulate them in truly bizarre and weird ways, and remain true to the Cthulhu Mythos vision.
David Conyers
#22. Even the Sun shed tears once in a while
Sheeja Jose
#24. Ian Rankin's Rebus is the king of modern British crime fiction. He is dour, determined, and constantly falls foul of his seniors. For all this, we root for him. He is eminently loveable, a quixotic hero moving through the darker half of a Jekyll and Hyde Edinburgh.
Mark Billingham
#26. What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.
'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.
Natasha Pulley
#27. They do think the world is some kind of science-fiction novel, then. Do you realize how fervently most people will believe in the promises of technology, even when those promises fly in the face of common sense?
Dexter Palmer
#28. The truth is, I can't help the way people perceive anything, from the role of financial industry in the economic crisis, to the place of women's fiction in the canon of modern literature, to the rank of mint chocolate chip ice cream as a favorite Baskin-Robbins flavor.
Erin Duffy
#29. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#30. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
Virginia Woolf
#31. THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.
Orson Scott Card
#32. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.
Sara Sheridan
#33. The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.
Jeff VanderMeer
#34. About the only valid definition (of science fiction) that I'm willing to accept is this: all of modern, mainstream, and realistic fiction is simply a branch, a category, or a subset of science fiction.
Mike Resnick
#35. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
Dylan Moran
#36. How much the fiction of Sir Walter Scott owes to Froissart, and to Philip de Comines after Froissart, those only can understand who have read both the old chronicles and the modern romances. It was one of the congenial labors of
William Cleaver Wilkinson
#38. I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.
Kate Adie
#39. Science fiction writers missed the most salient feature of our modern era: the Internet.
Jack McDevitt
#40. Worlds need those pockets, the urban closets that hide the skeletons of a modern society.
S.A. Check
#41. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
Charles Frazier
#42. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
#43. This director could say many things about duty, and self-respect, and dignity, but she knew none of these meant much in the post-modern world.
B. Barmanbek
#44. Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.
Barbara Kingsolver
#45. Most modern science fiction went to school on 'Dune.' Even 'Harry Potter' with its 'boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny' shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion.
Gary Ross
#46. I just saved your fucking life, Mom ... It's like, if you
people of a certain age
would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures.
Neal Stephenson
#47. He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.
Neal Stephenson
#48. 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
#49. I am a more modern female vampire since I came just when our world was disappearing due to the intromission of this future.-Enyo
Carolina Cody Aldaz
