Fiction Quotes

The writing seemed like the books that held it; crumbly and antique and bearing the stink of centuries. Still, it was compelling. His voice was smooth and kind, and once in a while an observation that would ring so true it vibrated like flicked crystal.

~ Lauren Groff

Having vision is much more than just being visual.

~ Heru Ofori-Atta

Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation--who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him--but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope--qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.

~ Bill Styron

She was going to go home after this and sip red wine and stare at the wall, I could tell. She would wonder why she was doing this, struggling against commercial interests at a corporate hospital when all she wanted to do was help people, and in the morning, when she walked out of her beautiful home and unlocked her convertible, she would remember.

~ Max Berry

I was its skin, its movement, its shape, its god, its creator, its destroyer. And you thought Dexter was bad. The Bridgeman arrives soon.

~ Catherine Astolfo

There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)

~ Colm Tóibín

His allure, as he stood there, his face, even with the red swollen eyes, everything about him was gorgeous.

~ Maryam Schonbeck

He never had nothing of his own before, except the kid, and he can’t claim but half the credit, there, maybe less. T.J.’s blond like his mamma, and stubborn, too. Won’t let nobody hold him except her. Cries every time his daddy picks him up. Every time he looks in those wet blue eyes, he nearly loses it. His own son hates him. Can’t blame the kid for having an opinion.

~ Nadria Tucker

…Mellor’s statement is extremist in two directions: human civilization is in imminent peril, and only one solution will work. I doubt both these formulations, and almost every fiction I have encountered that depends upon them.

~ Richard T. Nash

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

~ Eudora Welty

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.

~ Eudora Welty

Human life is fiction's only theme.

~ Eudora Welty

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.

~ Orson Scott Card

These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes and history was always just like today full of markets and wanting.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

~ Siri Hustvedt

You have seven writers in your basement?”Donald nods, signing, “They like it here. There’s a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don’t usually make much trouble.

~ Susan Wiggs

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure.

~ Eudora Welty

I want to be the best race horse around when I grow up, Mama.You can be, Charlie, as long as you are willing to try your best and not give up when you have a bad day.

~ Deanie Humphrys-Dunne

The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling every thought every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her as well as honour and love her for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

~ Virginia Woolf

Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don't get it. It's amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together''Yeah, well, that's a whole different thing.'(from Honey Pie)

~ Haruki Murakami

LOVE is the most incendiary element ever known, once it sparks the heart, the flame is inextinguishable.

~ H.s. Rissam

I gave up worrying about the principles of fiction writing when I realized that there weren't any.

~ Teri Louise Kelly

Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa (Mason father to his son in The Omniconstant

~ Christos Rodoulla Tsiailis

The pupil of a goat's eye is elongate like a cat's, but if you look closely you'll see that it's in the horizontal position, and if you look closer still you'll see that it's less gracefully shaped, more of a ragged slot, dirty yellow. And you'll see that the white of a goat's eye is all black.

~ Eugene Marten

See, the institutions and specialist, experts, you see. Yes, yes,experts, indeed. See, they would have us believe that there is an orderto art. An explanation. Humans are odd creatures in that way. Alwayssearching for a formula. Yes, a formula to create an expected norm forunexplainable greatness. A cook book you might say. Yes, a recipebook for life, love, and art. However, my dear, let me tell you. Yes,there is no such thing. Every individual is unique in their own design,as intended by God himself. We classify, yes, always must we classify,for if not, then we would be lost, yes lost now wouldn't we?Classification, order, expectations, but alas, we forget. For what is art,if not the out word expression of an artist. It is the soul of the artisanand if his expectations are met, than who are we to judge whether hiswork be art or not?

~ Cristina Marrero

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.

~ Flannery O'connor

Patience is a virtue Savannah, to tolerate delay. It implies self control and forbearance, as opposed to wanting what we want when we want it. Something to think about. . .Catherine Weaver (Character), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

~ Catherine Weaver

One wrong social move---say---like hanging with the wrong person,” she said nastily, “Can make your life around here a living nightmare and I definitely don’t think that you want that.

~ T.l. Clarke

Fiction: a game of pretend.

~ Marty Rubin

Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend.

~ Marty Rubin

histories of the world before our own. That was a world of empires, of corruption, of war-and more freedom than I've ever known. But the people of that time are gone, their dreams in ruin, existing only in smoke and ash.

~ Victoria Aveyard

It is said that there is never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart. The shroud that covers this free spirit is woven by the complex threads of society.

~ Swati Kumar

The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don't think so. And I don't think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths.

~ Siri Hustvedt

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Too many words for one book--truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.

~ David Benioff

Some fictions become fixtures in the real city. Their stories are so powerful that they leap off the page on to the streets, irreversibly altering the place where they were set.

~ Henry Eliot

Xavier was like some sort of sex drug that numbed my mind and clouded it. He made me stupid.

~ Kathey Gray

Popular! In America, what else matters?

~ Joyce Carol Oates

As a general rule, I surmise that most fictional stories are populated by misfits, changelings, and oddities, which is what makes the writing interesting and considered novel.

~ Todd Crawshaw

If you don't see something beautiful, change your viewpoint.

~ Erin Entrada Kelly