On Fiction Quotes

Quotes tagged as "on-fiction" Showing 31-60 of 77
Virginia Woolf
“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Lord Byron
“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!”
George Gordon Byron, Don Juan

Orson Scott Card
“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.”
Orson Scott Card

Kim Young-ha
“Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.”
Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

Tim O'Brien
“A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.”
Tim O'Brien

Bruno Bettelheim
“The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...”
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

Lauren Groff
“In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.”
Lauren Groff

Jeanne Warnes
“Imagination is a gift. Don't waste it!”
Jeanne Warnes

Daniel Keyes
“Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.”
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

Lord Byron
“For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.”
George Gordon Byron

Wilkie Collins
“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.”
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

Neil Gaiman
“There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.”
Neil Gaiman

Berkeley Breathed
“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.”
Berkeley Breathed

C. JoyBell C.
“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.”
C. JoyBell C.

Marvin Minsky
“General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.”
Marvin Minsky

Flannery O'Connor
“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.”
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“I love fictional characters...they can't break your heart.”
Julia Hall

Tim O'Brien
“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.”
Tim O'Brien

Jasper Fforde
“Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.”
Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots

David Foster Wallace
“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]”
David Foster Wallace

Orson Scott Card
“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.”
Orson Scott Card

“T.G.T.B.T: too good to be true.”
Madonna, Too Good to Be True

Benjamin Disraeli
“Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.”
Benjamin Disraeli

Milan Kundera
“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?”
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

Todd Strasser
“The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.”
Todd Strasser

Martin Amis
“Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life”
Martin Amis, Essays

Joyce Carol Oates
“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.”
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

Leonard S. Marcus
“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.”
Leonard S. Marcus, The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy

Victor Hugo
“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.”
Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three

Orson Scott Card
“Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.”
Orson Scott Card