On Fiction Quotes

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 i

~ David Foster Wallace

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 thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works out in the end. They'll beat the bad guys and put things right and everything ends up cool.In real life, vacuum cleaners kill spiders. If you cross a busy road without looking, you get whacked by a car. If you fall from a tree, you break some bones. Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins. I just wanted to make that clear before I begun.

~ Darren Shan

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

~ Young-Ha Kim

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

~ Todd Strasser

A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.

~ Isaac Babel

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

~ David Foster Wallace

But wishes are only granted in fairy tales.

~ Simone Elkeles

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

~ David Foster Wallace

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

~ Michael Scott

Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.

~ Jasper Fforde

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

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

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

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

~ Herman Wouk

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

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

~ Martin Amis

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

~ Orson Scott Card

Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

~ Douglas Adams

...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

~ Rebecca Makkai

Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.

~ Daniel Keyes

They weren't true stories, they were better than that.

~ Alice Hoffman

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

~ Orson Scott Card

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers.

~ Richard Ford

I love fictional characters...they can't break your heart.

~ Julia Hall

All stories are true. But some of them never happened.

~ James A. Owen

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

~ Alan Moore