Fiction Quotes

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

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.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

Reality always outstrips fiction. Whatever you make up, something more incredible always pops up in real life.

If you look for me, I'm in the fiction section. Romance has its own section.

I've seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country, and instead of learning about it through a textbook, I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie.

Science fiction is very healthy in its form.

A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

I like working closely with artists. I think that's very important in fantasy and science fiction - the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.

I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.