Top 100 On Fiction Quotes
#1. I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.
Daniel Handler
#2. On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.
George Stephen
#3. If this goes on . . ." fiction takes an element of life today, something clear and obvious and normally something troubling, and asks what would happen if that thing, that one thing, became bigger, became all-pervasive, changed the way we thought and behaved.
Ray Bradbury
#4. 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
#5. I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.
Edward Hirsch
#6. In fear we are acting on fiction and in love we are acting on truth
Richard Gerber
#7. Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?
Virginia Woolf
#8. She enjoyed this part, despite the out-and-out ban on fiction, but it was always a pleasure soaked in guilt.
Nikita Lalwani
#9. Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.
Umberto Eco
#10. Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
Margaret Atwood
#11. It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.
Mal Peet
#12. All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
#13. A true master will not deceive an able disciple. You are hampered by the limits you set and no limit can be set on skill.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#14. When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.
Sophie Hannah
#15. There was no point in the gods trying to separate us. Whether we were on Earth or in hell, we'd spend the rest our days look for the other.
Taisha DeAza
#16. I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.
Jeff Kinney
#17. I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It's my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories.
Nicholas Trandahl
#18. The world is full of sluts on skates. From Penn-warren's "All the Kings Men.
Martha Miller
#19. I gravitated to Judy Blume early on. 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing' was my favorite, with a realistic and relatable protagonist in Peter Hatcher. When I reached the fourth grade, I made the leap to science fiction and never looked back.
Jeff Kinney
#20. I have trust issues."
"I know. I'm on a mission to cure you of that.
Simone Elkeles
#21. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
Nina Sankovitch
#22. Every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
Hilary Mantel
#23. They say you can never step into the same river twice. And maybe that's how it was for Papi now, memories shifting and re-forming soundlessly beneath him while the rest of us sat on the shore and watched.
Sarah Ockler
#24. A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.
Robert A. Heinlein
#25. I'd never seen that look on another face before, had never identified it in another person. I'd only met with it in fiction. But everyone falls in love with Holden Caulfield when they're sixteen. They read Catcher in the Rye and don't feel so alone.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#26. She and I are as far apart as the stars in the sky and the soles of my feet." Detective Sean Ryan ~Deception on Sable Hill by Shelley Gray
Shelley Gray
#27. It was only much later that he was made flesh and blood [in the Gospels] on paper. Thus Christ was created as a literary creation.
Paul Louis Couchoud
#28. Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.
Daniel Keyes
#29. She waits for his reprimand or words of disapproval.
He kisses her instead. Hard. Lips demanding, fingers tightening on her chin. He consumes her with this single act.
Laura Kreitzer
#30. I was never a good journalist, because I would make things up. A lot of people frowned on that, which is why I ended up in fiction.
Marcia Muller
#31. The ice cold fear I'd felt, not knowing if Wyatt was alive, pressed into the wall with other girls and surrounded by guys who were unspeakably brave, hit my body again in a wave. This was trauma - the gift that keeps on giving.
Laura Anderson Kurk
#32. Dull late-afternoon light glittered on the hanging copper pots in the kitchen where the old painter sat with his wine, smoking cigarette, a letter angrily crumpled on the table in front of him.
Stephanie Cowell
#33. Fantasy is the oldest form of literature and science fiction is just a new twist on it.
Katharine Kerr
#34. I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away.
Deborah Meyler
#35. A joke is a witticism or play on words that's meant to be funny. I say 'meant to be' because most jokes aren't funny. They range between mildly amusing and grimace-inducingly annoying.
Michael Monroe
#36. What does it take to get you on board with building this district to mirror Coral Gables or the Hamptons?
Thomas Barr Jr.
#37. I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.
Berkeley Breathed
#38. Reality, my strange and precious one. Reality is fabric. Fabric is
reality. And your reality here is far easier to live with than where I
was on the other side. So that's why I don't want to go back, and
why you wouldn't like it.
Esme Ellis
#39. In Actual
Human Rights are
"caring" for Humans left on the planet
Haider Ali
#40. The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...
Bruno Bettelheim
#41. All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#42. Each time in fiction or in history I meet a well-defined personality I am personally interested in him, for we know each other already, because we met on the river.
Mark Twain
#43. Laser beams slid around them, spurts of light sinking through the darkness, eventually touching the stars or lighting the water for a moment on their death ride to the murky bottom.
Dean Koontz
#45. 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
#46. There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision.
Henry Petroski
#47. Love was for dummies, soulmates were the creation of pulp-fiction writers; romance was craved by ageing, lonely cat owners. Successful relationships were built on rationality and compromise.
Karan Bajaj
#48. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.
J.G. Ballard
#49. Come on, it's an American tradition. Apple soup? Mom's homemade chicken pie?'
She chuckled in spite of herself, then winced. 'It's apple pie and Mom's homemade chicken soup. But you didn't do badly, for a start.
L.J.Smith
#50. Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
Albert Camus
#51. The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.
Charles Dickens
#52. With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.
Philip Schultz
#53. Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet.
Vinton Cerf
#54. For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#55. An illusion is when everyone is in on the joke, a delusion is when you are the joke.
Austin Aragon
#56. For he had acquired, as time went on, the firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can one day materialize and see its fulfillment in space and time.
Stefan Grabinski
#57. This is a work of fiction. Still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible worlds is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe, it's not as fictional as we think.
Neil Gaiman
#58. I could've gone on and on but the truth was all that mattered.
My brother died because someone was jealous.
Laura Anderson Kurk
#59. It was not an unusual site to see Negro tenant farmers crossing the intersection of Spring and Barbrick on the way to the cotton warehouse
Nancy B. Brewer
#60. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.
Carla H. Krueger
#61. That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.
Patrick Modiano
#62. When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.
Ann Leckie
#63. The universe is all about balance. The forces of light and darkness are meant to keep a check on one another. If one becomes too powerful and starts overrunning the other, that balance will be upset. For the tyranny of virtue is as unbearable as the stranglehold of vice.
Shatrujeet Nath
#64. To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
Aldous Huxley
#65. Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.
Alice Munro
#66. True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about "knowing God," they mean more than, "I understand what you're saying about God," but also, "It fits my experience of Him.
Geoffrey Wood
#67. That odd infallible sliding-like-crystal air on water that means day's left dawn for morning.
H.D.
#68. I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
Megan Abbott
#69. Yes, he wanted me to do Funny Games before, which I didn't want to do because the film was very theoretical - the way people experience violence on screen. There was very little space for fiction, it was more like a sacrifice for the actors than anything else.
Isabelle Huppert
#70. Jace's husky voice almost came out in a purr. He said, "You want to make a bet on that, Charlie." Oh yeah, he can sell that stuff alright. "No worries," Jace was saying. "I only have eyes for you." He touched the tip of my nose with his finger. I swatted him away. Jace laughed.
~Jace~
J.L. Clayton
#71. Nothing is 'wrong' with me, Dan. What's wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.
Martin Hopkins
#72. I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.
Sigourney Weaver
#74. The wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#75. Don't know when my life came to visualising intense pain and tragedy to putting it down on paper, to putting across a message of love in times of abject hate. Thank you everybody and the conspiracy of the stars for showing me this day. To many, many more books, inshallah, and to many more launches.
Simran Keshwani
#76. When Psyche got up to leave, Eros once again mentioned that he would miss her on Sunday."Even if you come on Sunday, I shall not be able to give you what you want. I shall be having my period then & it will be too messy for your liking," his secretary advised him.[MMT]
Nicholas Chong
#77. They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.
'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.
John Gardner
#78. I let myself flop - so gently, so slowly - into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.
Frederik Pohl
#79. Most of the fiction on the California Gold Rush makes it sound like one grand, boyish adventure. However, when you read the real history, you realize that it wasn't that way at all.
Laurence Yep
#80. The only thing altruism will get you here is a boot stomping on your head.
Henry Mosquera
#81. War's all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now.
Samuel Snoek-Brown
#82. I base the roles I choose depending on the characters. That's just how I'm gonna run my career. So if it's a good role I'm gonna take it whether it be fantasy, or whether it be realistic or fiction, anything.
Josh Hutcherson
#83. Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket.
Alan Moore
#84. I love the grandiosity of Hollywood movies, and even in independents, I love the canvas you can tell your story on. I love fiction filmmaking, you really feel like you're creating something.
George Hickenlooper
#85. I had been working on this series called 'Everything Dies,' and it was basically me doing non-fiction essays, responding to religion and stuff like that, and I really got into this ideas of telling factual stories via comics.
Box Brown
#86. 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
#87. Soccer forces life to move on. There's always a new match. A new season. There's always a dream that everything can get better. It's a game of wonders.
Fredrik Backman
#88. He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction.
Adelle Waldman
#89. Like many science fiction lovers of my generation, I discovered Andre Norton on the shelves at the junior high's library.
Sherwood Smith
#90. All stories are true. But some of them never happened.
James A. Owen
#91. I would write light entertainment nonfiction pieces during the day, then come home and work on my fantasy fiction. It was very difficult to get out of the one mindset and into another one.
Cassandra Clare
#92. Shaw Centre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where the ACS boy can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those sotong RI boys.
Justin Ker
#93. Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.
Arthur C. Clarke
#94. If he lived through this night, he'd look back on this moment and recall seeing the universe in all its majesty and recognizing he was only a powerless man staring into the vastness of an all-powerful God.
Cindy Woodsmall
#95. I don't know who those other people are and what they did to you, but I'm not one of them," I whispered, on the verge of tears. (Molly)
"You are. You just don't know yet." (Victor)
A.B. Whelan
#96. I promise to keep my hands to myself. I'm too exhausted to make a move on you.
Faith Sullivan
#97. An evil brute grows strong and now is on the verge of crossing over from the island to the world you know. His name is Hubal, and his strength grows as your world's lightness folds.
Soroosh Shahrivar
#98. They've also asked me now to start on another series that we're gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it's not science fiction, it's more in the Mystery and Crime division and that's another area I'm very interested in.
Bruce Boxleitner
#99. Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.
Jean M. Auel
#100. Just because some dreams never see light that doesn't make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn's but trust me the illusion is worse.
Parul Wadhwa
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