Fiction Quotes

I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

~ Matt Haig

Literature is the real life of imaginary people.

~ Stefanos Livos

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill.

~ Eileen Favorite

I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

Some things can be fixed. Some things are just too broken.

~ Susan Vaught

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.

~ Charlie Brooker

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

~ Neil Gaiman

No matter how strong you are, you cannot hold open the jaws of a great-white shark with your bare hands... that can do your brain.

~ Ivan Stoikov

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

~ Graham Swift

I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said a made-up story is a bit like telling lies, only the people who read them knew that already and so it didn’t matter

~ Rebecca Lloyd

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.

~ Leland Ryken

dianemoorewriter.comFebruary 11, 2015 · From Love Thy Neighbor On journalism and news purists as well as why I pursued print instead of TV journalism/news at the No. 1 journalism school in the country: news reporters are willing to take risks so that people can base their lives on a foundation of truth not lies. That's why I do it -- to be the one responsible voice in the crowd. Page 105' Love Thy Neighbor

~ Diane Moore

Never give up! And write for yourself first and foremost.

~ Aminah Iman

Standing in front of the white picket fence, I stared at the multitude of champagne roses weaving their hunter green vines gracefully through and around the fence. Soft hints of pink hues whispered from the centers of the blooms. Their petals covered the lush ground and rolled in a lazy dance with the warm summer breeze...

~ Leah Lozano

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

~ Ray Bradbury

There's no difference between pulp fiction and highbrow fiction, one is as good as the other, the only difference is the aura they have, and that's determined by the people who read the stuff, not by the book itself. There's no such thing as 'the book itself.

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

She died without us by her side, and now, we are left with the scars. In time, perhaps they will fade, but for now, they're still hauntingly there reminding us of the loss and pain.

~ Sophie Palmer

What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in - fully understand - the inward world of another person.

~ Rick Gekoski

Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure.

~ Mario Vargas Llosa

Oscar always said that books are truly our best friends. He said that they never think poorly of us and that they always have a shoulder for us to cry on or relieve stress. They take our minds away from the real world by telling us captivating stories. When we look back at our choice of books, we can nostalgically recall our younger years.

~ Erica Sehyun Song

These scars that we have... they don't go away. They only fade with time, but they're still hauntingly there.

~ Taylor Keys

Non-fiction is to theory as fiction is to experience.

~ Joyce Rachelle

The pain is real. Flowing as a brook beneath my flesh. I am broken, and yet, I still breathe.

~ E.m. Benton

The story was heavy in her hands, the book spread open like legs, the letters very small i spite of describing such a big moment

~ Natalia Jaster

And once you've been to this Center, this Truth, you'll know your way everywhere. You are never lost again.

~ David Housholder

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.

~ Mary Rose O'reilley

What Joab did not and could not know was that it was ego, and the ego of a king is just like the ego of anyone else. It is a social infection, entering each person as a psychological virus that is passed on by their parents’ egos and other social stimuli. It is born of negativity—of not being good enough thoughts of not having enough, of fear, and worry of failure. Because of its insecure nature, the ego loves to dominate and control others. It’s control or be controlled.

~ Marco Raye

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

~ Kathryn Hurn

Regarding beliefs and belief systems: We argue what and how we feel, rather than what we - actually - know or assume to be facts or factual evidence. Thus, it is justifiably prudent to challenge that which has been adopted or enforced by tradition. If such examination is discouraged by fearful tactics - we must not shy away from soulful searching.

~ T.f. Hodge

Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking ‘muck’ across the floor of fact.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Most of our fears are borrowed. Since that’s the case, we should get busy returning them.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.

~ Andrew Wilson

The silence was worse than the gunshots. The wait worse than the confusion. The forebode worsethan any danger.

~ Willowy Whisper

And so we continued to live in fear, hoping that we would not get caught. Fear had become our constant companion at this dreadful Lashkar-e-Taiba camp.

~ Vivek Pereira

It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.

~ William H. Gass

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.

~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio