Quotes About Fiction

#1. I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

Terry Pratchett

#2. The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.'

Gregory Benford

#3. All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real ...

Vijay Seshadri

#4. Even if the past exists as an independent reality outside the minds of those who write about it, we can never know that reality. Historians and writers of historical fiction attempt to fill in the gaps, to say: 'This is how it might have been.'

John Zanetti

#5. Science fiction and comedy are generally a pretty bumpy mix.

Matt Groening

#6. Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

Stephen Graham Jones

#7. Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction.

Elizabeth McCracken

#8. The Squire's life was quite as idle as his sons', but it was a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm.

George Eliot

#9. Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.

Joe Wilson

#10. Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.

Yann Martel

#11. ...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...

Stephen King

#12. Humanity lives in its fiction.

Blaise Cendrars

#13. Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

V.S. Naipaul

#14. Utopian and dystopian truth is stranger than fiction.

Michael Wall

#15. Maybe I have a one-track mind, but the best writers and thinkers are focusing on nonfiction these days; this is the genre where a writer can make a mark and change an aspect of the world - much more so than in fiction.

Lee Gutkind

#16. I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

Philippa Gregory

#17. The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#18. Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?

Arthur Phillips

#19. I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way.

Miranda July

#20. I shall speak facts; but some will say I deal in fiction.

Ovid

#21. For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.

Romesh Gunesekera

#22. I'm just attracted to the action element of science fiction. It's great to sit in the editing room with the director and sound engineers and to create the feeling where your heart is racing and you're sitting at the edge of your seat and you find yourself holding your breath.

Gale Anne Hurd

#23. I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

Hallie Ephron

#24. For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Manuel Puig

#25. I can remember when 'Pulp Fiction' came out. I was, like, 10 years old. But I remember the impact that it had.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead

#26. Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

Deborah Eisenberg

#27. Once you realize that the imagination is non-fiction, the world is yours

Carl Henegan

#28. Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

Errol Morris

#29. I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

Mark Haddon

#30. Apparently I've been typecast in science fiction: I'm a Russian bisexual telepathic Jew.

Claudia Christian

#31. I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.

Steve Earle

#32. We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture.

Olaf Stapledon

#33. Science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction.

Damon Knight

#34. You don't discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer them to read. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Neil Gaiman

#35. If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.

Roxane Gay

#36. In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

Maria Semple

#37. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Susan Sontag

#38. The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

Raymond Carver

#39. Fiction is an expressionist painting rather than a photograph.

Josip Novakovich

#40. Begin your writing, fiction or article, where the action begins. This action can be internal (e.g., an important insight or personal decision) or external (e.g., a murder or calamity). Begin too early, you lose your reader. Begin too late, you lose your story.

Walt Shiel

#41. The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy - the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

Julie Schumacher

#42. The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

Tom Robbins

#43. As success converts treason into legitimacy, so belief converts fiction into fact, and nothing is but what is not.

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#44. The fiction, as always, is secondary to the history; the real women are always more complex and more conflicted, greater than the heroines of the novel, just as real women now, as then, are often greater than they are reported, sometimes greater than the world wants them to be.

Philippa Gregory

#45. In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

Dan Chaon

#46. Larger than life is your fiction in a universe made up of one.

Sarah McLachlan

#47. To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen.

Muhammad Yunus

#48. It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it.

Jon McGregor

#49. I believe in hope, in what is something called "radical hope." I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that's why I write fiction, probaby. It's my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r

John Green

#50. 'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#51. There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#52. My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Jerry B. Jenkins

#53. Analog, or Asimov's Magazine, or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

David Brin

#54. The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.

Herman Wouk

#55. The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.

Lee Child

#56. Fact is only what you believe and fact and fiction work as a team.

Jack Johnson

#57. Artworks, whether fiction, music, or painting, because they have the power and possibility to become truth, when repeated enough or told enough are somehow truth about what America is, whether they were or not.

Cynthia Daignault

#58. Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

Rebecca West

#59. It [science fiction] really is the only genre that lets you use your imagination without limitations.

Steven Spielberg

#60. People are writing post-apocalyptic fiction like there's no tomorrow!

Cassandra Page

#61. We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

Saul David

#62. Being safe is fiction.

Tom Hodgkinson

#63. As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Ayelet Waldman

#64. I was watching 'Pulp Fiction' when we were making 'Now and Then'. I didn't care about 'Now and Then,' you know?

Gaby Hoffmann

#65. Because at bottom, I'm interested in fear, and in courage and cowardice and these are easier to get at through fiction, where you can enter people's heads.

Kevin Patterson

#66. I'm sold as a literary writer in Holland; I'm sold as crime fiction in England. I think of it as just literature.

Karin Slaughter

#67. Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.

Arthur C. Clarke

#68. They say fiction is the closest well ever get from magic. Open a book and an entire world will pop out and it doesn't matter if it's dragons or Victorian children or wizards. You are immediately someone else and somewhere else

Holly Smale

#69. In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form.

Karan Bajaj

#70. Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is a classic example of science fiction.

Pope Benedict XVI

#71. I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.

Richard Russo

#72. What distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it.

Bruce Meyer

#73. The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

Carl Clinton Van Doren

#74. Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories.

Orson Scott Card

#75. What fiction could match - in drama or suspense - man's first walk on the Moon?

Leonard Nimoy

#76. Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused ... this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences ... Photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.

Taryn Simon

#77. If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

Darin Strauss

#78. Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#79. I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it's less good than what I do, there's no point in reading it, if it's better than what I do it makes me depressed

Douglas Adams

#80. Actors endow the villain in fiction with a warmth and quality that makes them memorable. I think we like fictional villains because they're the Mr. Hyde of our own dreams. I've met a few real villains in my time, and they weren't the least bit sympathetic.

John Rhys-Davies

#81. Fiction, when it's done right, does in the daylight what dreams do at night: we leave the confines of our own experiences and go to common ground, where for a time we are not alone.

Jincy Willett

#82. It's hard to get justice in the real world. It's possible in fiction.

Lauren Beukes

#83. Doctor Who has never pretended to be hard science fiction ... At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem.

Neil Gaiman

#84. I read all the Agatha Christies when I was younger and like Sherlock Holmes. Crime fiction has always fascinated me, but I'll read anything anyone gives me.

Emilia Fox

#85. Science fiction is not about the future. Like all other fiction, it is about the present. It simply uses different techniques to show us who we are, who we might be, and whom we ought to become.

Orson Scott Card

#86. Why do we write fiction? Professor Piper asked.
Cath looked down at her notebook.
To disappear.

Rainbow Rowell

#87. Sometimes people say that we're living in the future, and time's up for science fiction, but I think that never will be, because science fiction really isn't about the future. It's about change and present-day concerns

Stephen Baxter

#88. When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.

Michael Chabon

#89. I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

Sara Sheridan

#90. I'm a big fan of science fiction, animation, and things of that nature. Other worlds and that type of stuff.

Lupe Fiasco

#91. Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

Ben Marcus

#92. When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

Geraldine Brooks

#93. Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

Haruki Murakami

#94. The '70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.

Ann Leckie

#95. Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

Nadine Gordimer

#96. Fiction started up, and we started burning brain cells on stories about things that didn't happen to people who didn't exist. Why? The only answer can be that humans deeply, deeply desired it.

Lee Child

#97. Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

Sophie Hannah

#98. I have done a lot of things outside of Science Fiction, but there has been an almost disproportionate amount of that genre in my body of work. I don't know what to make of it.

Daniel Dae Kim

#99. I grew up watching science fiction and action movies. I love it. I absolutely love it!

Katee Sackhoff

#100. I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

Susan Choi