On Fiction Quotes
Quotes tagged as "on-fiction"
Showing 31-60 of 77
“Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!”
― Don Juan
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!”
― Don Juan
“We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.”
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“Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.”
― I Have The Right To Destroy Myself
― I Have The Right To Destroy Myself
“The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...”
― The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
― The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
“Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.”
― Flowers for Algernon
― Flowers for Algernon
“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.”
― The Woman in White
― The Woman in White
“There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.”
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“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.”
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“Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.”
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“General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.”
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“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.”
― Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
― Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.”
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“Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.”
― The Well of Lost Plots
― The Well of Lost Plots
“Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."
[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]”
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[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]”
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“We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.”
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“All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”
― The Art of the Novel
― The Art of the Novel
“The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.”
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“Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.”
― The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
― The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
“Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own “real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.”
― The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy
― The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy
“History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.”
― Ninety-Three
― Ninety-Three
“Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.”
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