Fiction Quotes

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

Mark Twain

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

Salman Rushdie

The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.

John Podhoretz

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

George Eliot

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

Janet Frame

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

Oscar Wilde

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

Virginia Woolf

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

Robert Browning

For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

W. Somerset Maugham

The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence -- a lot passes you by -- simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Anita Brookner

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Francis Bacon

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

Henry Miller

I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems of death.

Clive Barker

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
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