Quotes About Fictions

#1. God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Richard Flanagan

#2. The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.

Umberto Eco

#3. In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.

Kathy Acker

#4. Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

R.D. Laing

#5. Fictions of law must be consistent with justice.

William Henry Maule

#6. They should hold themselves absolutely upon the immovable foundation of truth and nature, whereby alone they can save themselves from misapprehensions and from the danger of being entirely carried away from reality into mere dreams and fictions.

Ethan A. Hitchcock

#7. The mere suggestion of fame and fortune casts a glamour all its own. It is rather alarming how quickly people will turn someone else's fiction into fact in order to support their own fictions of themselves.

Libba Bray

#8. Yet we can be sure that whatever fictions exist in Wall Street bookkeeping, the earth is a faithful scribe, a faultless calculator, a superb bookkeeper; we will be held responsible for every bit of our economic folly.

Thomas Berry

#9. Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage.

Norman Lock

#10. When we leave society and come into the presence of Nature, we become children again; and the fictions of thought and action assumed among men drop off like a garment.

Amelia Barr

#11. Like all of my fictions, 'Sinner' is a mirror. Look into it and you will find yourself. What you do with what you see is your choice.

Ted Dekker

#12. Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.

Nick Cave

#13. I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.

Charles De Lint

#14. We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next.

Ilsa J. Bick

#15. On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.

Martin Buber

#16. All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

Orson Scott Card

#17. I was in love with the idea of love, so I created elaborate fictions for my relationships - fictions that allowed me to believe that what any given paramour and I shared looked a lot like love.

Roxane Gay

#18. Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?

Natasha Trethewey

#19. Our lives are fictions, a work we leave behind, signed.

Vanna Bonta

#20. We authors, who trade in fictions for a living, are a continuum of all that we have seen and heard, and most importantly, all that we have read.

Neil Gaiman

#21. Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?

George Herbert

#22. Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.

A.S. Byatt

#23. In other words, science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong.

Michael Ruse

#24. Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.

Bodhidharma

#25. The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.

Walter Lippmann

#26. All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

George Bernard Shaw

#27. My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.

Harold Bloom

#28. The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.

Karl Jaspers

#29. I look around with divine precision and gazing free upon the earth, I see -
- architects and earthquakes - empaths and robots - fictions and near misses - lives changing, children sleeping, beauty brimming.
I see us - trying on ways of being - so sweet and messy, so worthwhile.

Laurie Perez

#30. Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

Robert Anton Wilson

#31. Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means, of resisting them.

Lucretius

#32. Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

Norman Lock

#33. I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.

Gore Vidal

#34. The fictions were far more persuasive than the facts, and more persuasive than both was the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity, with the promise of emancipation at the end. My father's grievances were real and well founded. But his solutions were dreams.

Roger Scruton

#35. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Alice Munro

#36. Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

Emile M. Cioran

#37. The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Siri Hustvedt

#38. You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

Brad Warner

#39. Somehow, miraculously, they forced themselves, told themselves they were going to live. They wrote themselves new lives. Fictions, perhaps, but what did it matter? They had kept the chaos at bay. They had managed to stop cursing the darkness. They'd lit a torch.

Benjamin Alire Saenz

#40. To suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual; and, therefore, though in reality he should happen not to regard him with interest, it is one of the fictions of courtesy to presume that he does.

Thomas De Quincey

#41. By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same surprise ... both strike us as if they were simultaneously remembrances and revelations.

Tod Papageorge

#42. In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.

Junot Diaz

#43. This is not one of your fictions where people bleed ink.

Terence Paul Winter

#44. For the first time, Smollett adopted a device that Barbara Foley calls "pseudofactual imposture," a strategy of presentation that we associate with the fictions of Behn, Defoe, and Richardson.

Tobias Smollett

#45. A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

Richard Schickel

#46. One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.

Richard M. Weaver

#47. Every fiction since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, utility.

James Mackintosh

#48. As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

Slavoj Zizek

#49. There aren't really rules for painting, but there's certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They're like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention.

Vija Celmins

#50. There can be no greater antithesis than between the Greeks' rational and objective truth and the "truth of unreason," as Bertrand Russell aptly termed faith in religions, fictions about supernatural beings that soothe and comfort weaklings who are afraid to contemplate the grim world of reality.

Revilo P. Oliver

#51. Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

Jonathan Swift

#52. Some dreams we have are nothing else but dreams, Unnatural and full of contradictions; Yet others of our most romantic schemes, Are something more than fictions.

Thomas Hood

#53. Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I've created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I'm creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.

Sally Mann

#54. People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

Libba Bray

#55. Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#56. (paraphrasing 1 Cor. 1:25) that the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.13

Walter Brueggemann

#57. Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?

Lauren Slater

#58. All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings' palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicated the one miracle of intellectual enlargement.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#59. Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions ...

David Hume

#60. I am not dangerous. Only the stories are dangerous. Only the fictions we create, especially when they become expectations.

David Levithan

#61. We create truths by describing, or by re-describing , our beliefs and observations. Our task, and the task of every artist and scientist, is to re-describe our inherited assumptions and invented fictions in order to create new paradigms for the future.

Anne Bogart

#62. To be sane, we must recognise our beliefs as fictions.

James Hillman

#63. All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

Jeremy Northam

#64. I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

Norman Lock

#65. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

Isaac Newton

#66. I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Siri Hustvedt

#67. Of all the fictions we heard last week in Tampa, the one I find most troubling is this: If we all just go our own way, our nation will be stronger for it. Because if we sever the threads that connect us, the only people who will go far are those who are already ahead.

Julian Castro

#68. We see nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood. This is the problem.

Patrick McGrath

#69. It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.

Orson Scott Card

#70. I have been induced to adopt this course by a desire that my readers should be taught to think as well as to experiment, and thus be qualified at an early part of their study to discriminate between the true and the false, and acquire the facts of the science without being mystified by its fictions.

John Joseph Griffin

#71. Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.

Timothy Leary

#72. The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.

Michael Lind

#73. Be so good as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that's what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.

Salman Rushdie

#74. The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#75. My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

Ben Lerner

#76. Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.

Manuel Puig

#77. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

Nancy Mairs

#78. According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.

Allen Tate

#79. Gaston Milhaud, like many of his contemporaries, sought to overthrow empirical positivism by insisting on the fundamental reality of the mind, but mind conceived in the Kantian sense. The knowledge of nature is symbolic, and there is no necessary connection between the phenomena and our fictions.

Fulton J. Sheen

#80. A yawning hole deep inside me was begging to be filled up with words and thoughts and ideas and facts and fictions.
Callum McGregor

Malorie Blackman

#81. It often happens that people come to believe in their own fictions.

Robert Rhodes James

#82. Fictions are realities we don't think of, that are happening to people we know nothing about.

Sanhita Baruah

#83. I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?

Neil Gaiman

#84. With the historical fictions, I was already doing so much research, and so much of the stories was anchored by historical truth that the move to nonfiction didn't feel all that dramatic - just another half-step to the right.

Debra Dean

#85. Rock and roll allowed people to lie about themselves, and to be sanctified for the extravagance of their fictions. This

Steve Almond

#86. We've all seen 'Network' and 'Wag the Dog,' but we were somehow insulated by the fact that those were just movies, fictions, and we could rest easy that the Real News doesn't operate that way. Well, it does - sometimes.

Peter Landesman

#87. And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

Chinua Achebe

#88. Polite fictions are very important for dragons.

Bard Bloom

#89. Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

Lawrence Durrell

#90. We accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.

Thomas C. Foster

#91. since nothing is more predictable than the media's parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by the others, whether or not the story is true, because

John Le Carre

#92. What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.

Graham Greene

#93. What are the odds that two separate writers, strangers, a thousand miles apart, would each invent fictions in which guys take girls to an esoteric frog lecture on their first date? If that isn't synchronicity, it's something equally as weird.

Tom Robbins

#94. We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.

Plato

#95. There have already been published by the bucketsful such brazen lies and utter fictions about me that I would long since have gone to my grave if I had allowed myself to pay attention to them.

Albert Einstein

#96. Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Paul Auster

#97. The limited fictions used to sell the lives of public figures often form a cloudy chiaroscuro that covers their true humanity.

William J. Mann

#98. Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.

Michael Chabon

#99. This is why she hates Alabaster: not because he is more powerful, not even because he is crazy, but because he refuses to allow her any of the polite fictions and unspoken truths that have kept her comfortable, and safe, for years.

N.K. Jemisin

#100. Then let's treat all these holy texts as stories, fictions, and imperfections that could excite us to tears or erections.

Rawi Hage