Fiction Quotes

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.

In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It's so schizophrenic.

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper's Prairie had few followers.

My fiction is reviewed by the mainstream press, by science fiction periodicals, romance magazines, small press publications and various other journals, including some usually devoted to archaeological and other science material.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

I'm able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are.

And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.

His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.

Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.

When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

There is an odd sense of responsibility attached to appearing in a drama about a real piece of history. A work of fiction is fun.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

I love the fact that it's not only about Star Trek, but about science fiction in general, and science.

Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.