Fiction Quotes

I am taken to the police station and they place me in an interrogation room. I am there for about thirty minutes before someone walks in.

~ Jorge Ortiz

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

~ Sara Sheridan

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

~ Sara Sheridan

Ironically, [living in] communities of the like - minded is one of the greatest dangers of today ́s globalized world. And it ́s happening everywhere, among liberals and conservatives, agnostics and believers, the rich and the poor, East and West alike. We tend to form clusters based on similarity, and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people. In my opinion, one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling

~ Elif Shafak

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

~ Sara Sheridan

Then, the door opens and there he is; silhouetted in the hall light. Long hair, long legs, and a heartbeat in tune with my own.

~ Hunter S. Jones

With one perfect kiss on one perfect English summer afternoon, we understand the meaning of all the colors of every rainbow, forevermore.

~ Hunter S. Jones

Nashville has always been competitive. My granddaddy called it the Hillbilly Babylon.

~ Hunter S. Jones

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

~ Anthony Burgess

When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life

~ Carl Henegan

It’s a very private moment when your heart breaks. I was thankful we were alone. I knew I couldn’t keep her, but I would always do anything to protect her.

~ S.g. Holster

If I kiss you now, I won't be able to stop.

~ Katlyn Charlesworth

My mother picked me up in her arms, touching my checks comforting my distress. I stared into her eyes and held her hair in my small hands, for the first time realizing what a moment in time meant. I touched her cheek and then looked away, knowing this was the truth to life, and there was nothing I could do about it. The truth that her death would one day occur made me realize that I never wanted her to leave my side. It was something I could not control, something no one could ever stop no matter how strong they were.

~ Joseph Mcginnis

My new story collection won’t please everyone, nor was it meant to. Then again, not everybody lives in my world. If they did, I’d have to move out and find another world to write about.

~ Ted Gargiulo

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

~ Sara Sheridan

Just then a familiar voiced spoke right in to Stephens’s ear which startled him as his eyes once again began slowly opening. “Don’t try to move or talk you two, not that you could if you wanted to anyway.” It was Bob inches away from his face and he sounded very different now, his voice was low and threatening and his eyes were unsmiling and cold. “Very soon you will be gone and there will be no trace of any of you here, or us for that matter.” He felt Bob go through his pockets until eventually he saw that he had pulled his van keys out of his pocket. Stephen looked around for his baby and he could see the others passing a sleeping Rosie clutching Roo and her dummy to the goblin like creatures. They grabbed her with their long thin hands with talon like fingers and then began sniffing her like animals that smelt out the prey. Bob saw him looking at them walking off with Rosie. “Don’t worry Stephen. The sproggers will care for her” Bob told him before letting out a spine shivering sinister laugh.

~ Gary Peeling

Ah, dear Reader, is there a married man living who hasn’t purged his drawers and closets of premarital memorabilia, only to have one more incriminating relic from yester-life rear its lovely head? Kristy contends that old flames never die, not completely. They smolder for years in hidden places. They flare up again just when you think you’re over them. They can burn you if you don’t deal with them. Such is the price I’ve had to pay for not rooting out the evidence of my life B.C. (Before Contentment). Or, perhaps, for having planted it too well. But that, you see, is no longer an issue. Shall I tell you the crux of this argument? A man with a past can be forgiven. A man without one cannot be trusted. If there were no pictures in my drawer for Kirsty to uncover, I would have had to produce some.

~ Ted Gargiulo

Make sure he's worth it. She had thought it so many times it had become a part of her. Like her tongue filling her mouth, so this tenet filled her being.

~ Colleen Mccarty

Procuring the house in Ballister was a desperate bid for respect, for recognition, the ultimate gesture (or sacrifice, as it turned out) that would prove him a worthy successor to the Flo and Walter Prices of the world. To my mind, the Culver was Norm’s way home, the only way he knew. It was an ever-evolving means to an ever-evolving end that eventually ended him. Who or what led Norm down that thorny path—devotion, economic pressures, family cynicism, Beth’s insatiable appetite—has been a topic of endless debate. You can believe what you want to believe. Personally, I don’t think any rational argument under the sun would have deterred Beth’s “messiah” from his mission. If the Ballister acquisition was Norm’s cross, as everyone seems to think it was, then it was Norm who chose to bear that cross. And pride that nailed him to it.

~ Ted Gargiulo

Picture this broad: 22 going on 18. Half the guys in my class would have given their left testicle to date her. This cupcake is the guidance counselor the principal has assigned me. Miss Boyle is her name. We all call her “Miss Bubbly Water.” Imagine the teasing I have to endure from my friends. Not to mention what it’s like, sitting across from this Barbie Doll every Thursday afternoon, watching her cross and uncross her legs, while she’s lecturing me about—get this: “staying focused.” Right! My pants are on fire, and she’s handing me a crash course in Psych 101!

~ Ted Gargiulo

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.

~ Tim O’brien

Love, is an unknown passion, for an unknown person, for an unknown reason.

~ Hamza Hassan Sheikh

...but the air's flat and stale and the people half-hearted. There's nothing to do there. You can make love without trouble or meaning, or get mildly drunk, or extract second-hand emotions from the cinema, or put your mind to sleep on a dance-floor, or play bridge, or throw yourself in front of a train on the Underground. There are forty ways of escaping from consciousness. But I want something more exciting than that.

~ Eric Linklater

My breath is halted, like grasping for air after crying far too long and hard. It is like a hiccup, with a shivering sharpness of nerves. It is like icicles running down your spine or aluminum in your mouth, an eerie amount of emotions that cannot compare to the actual feelings you’ve managed to live through. I just watched you die, I say to myself silently.

~ Joseph Mcginnis

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

~ Sara Sheridan

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

~ Sara Sheridan

I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it.

~ Sara Sheridan

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

~ Sara Sheridan

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.

~ Sara Sheridan

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

~ Sara Sheridan

The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum.

~ Sara Sheridan

Nanny Ogg was an attractive lady, which is not the same as being beautiful. She fascinated Casanunda. She was an incredibly comfortable person to be around, partly because she had a mind so broad it could accommodate three football fields and a bowling alley.

~ Terry Pratchett

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine dramatic showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out -- don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams yay and jumps up and down for joy -- when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.

~ Francine Prose

I do love you. I love you enough to accept who you are. Why can’t I received the same feeling in return?”-Ariel

~ Khalia Hades

I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.

~ Neil Gaiman

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

~ Philip Sington

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

~ Marcel Proust

That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me.

~ Junot Díaz

Aging and the prospect of dying by no means enhance the attractiveness of fictitious comforts to come in paradise, or the veracity of malicious myths about hellfire and damnation. Fear and feeblemindedness cannot be credibly pressed into service to support fantastic claims about the cosmos and our ultimate destiny.Whether one would even consider turning to religion in advanced years has much to do with upbringing, which makes all the more important standing up to the presumptions of the religious in front of children. One would regard the Biblical events – a spontaneously igniting bush, a sea’s parting, human parthenogenesis, a resurrected prophet and so on – that supposedly heralded God’s intervention in our affairs as the stuff of fairy tales were it not for the credibility we unwittingly lend them by keeping quiet out of mistaken notions of propriety.

~ Jeffrey Tayler

Outside the Bar Del Prado, night was coming on like a hopeless, drunken come-on, tequila on its breath, red neon signs and, outside the shops, strings of colored Christmas lights hung from the eaves like the sad, close-lipped smiles of boys who would lure you in with their loneliness, that melancholia you'd try and try to fix.

~ Michaela Carter