Quotes on Fiction :: Finest Quotes

Fiction Quotes

Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.

A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.

Martin Amis

Money doesnt mind if we say its evil, it goes from strength to strength. Its a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

Martin Amis

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course being also a novelist am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

Margaret Eleanor Atwood

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

Francis Bacon

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Isaac Asimov

One of the stranger beliefs in science fiction is a passionate belief in Beautiful Writing--lots and lots of extraspecial exciting words thrown no hurled no CASCADED upon the reader in a shimmering shower of precious verbal gleaming gleanings and a singing pillar of righteous fiery syntactic spinach. The only thing that was good in that sentence was the spinach, and the hell with it.

John Barnes

Shaw's emotional development was one with his intellectual strength. His path led him into the thick of the scrimmage, where more spontaneous natures defend themselves with the usual weapons of malice, humility, bad temper or conceit. But Shaw used the death ray of imperturbability. His feelings were never hurt, his envy never aroused, his conceit was a transparent fiction, he never quarreled.

Jacques Barzun

...I was trying to make fiction that was like certain kinds of modern painting. You know, tending toward the abstract. But its really very dicey in fiction, because if you get too abstract it just looks like fog, for example. Words, after all, have referents. They mean something colors don't. Not in the same way. So, the project is next to impossible, which is what makes it interesting. There's nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem. It gives purpose to life. And to work. I'm still worrying with it.

Donald Barthelme

Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.

Donald Barthelme

The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.

Frdric Bastiat

Seventeen years after its intial release, The Empire Strikes Back is still as thrilling and involving as ever. Because of the high quality of the original product, it doesn't show a hint of dating. Neither [Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope nor Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi] were able to match the narrative scope of Empire, which today remains one of the finest and most rousing science fiction tales ever committed to the screen.

James Berardinelli

Since 1977, there have been many science fiction movies, but none has managed to equal [A New Hope's] blend of adventure, likable characters, and epic storytelling.

James Berardinelli

Although The Terminator is arguably the more visionary of the first two films, [Terminator 2] is the more visually and viscerally satisfying. It's an exhausting experience and, even 18 years after its release (as I write this review), few films have matched it within the science fiction genre for sheer white-knuckle exhilaration.

James Berardinelli

My favorite was this new program that I looked at, I wish I had seen it in 3D, and you sit there and you watch this science fiction thing unfold in front of you.

Joseph Robinette

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Aneurin Bevan

Blade Runner is a rare science fiction movie so full of material that pages can be written about it without scratching the surface. A review like this can provide little more than an overview. A detailed exploration of the movie, its style, and its mysteries requires dedication that only someone immersed in Blade Runner lore can provide.

James Berardinelli

We're not going to deport 12 million people, so let's stop this fiction.

Michael Bloomberg

Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

William M. Kucmierowski

I hate the whole ubermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of 20 really hard-working, intelligent people couldn't do the same thing.

William M. Kucmierowski

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