On Fiction Quotes

When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

The average ground temperature of the Earth is impossible to measure since most of the Earth is ocean...So this average ground temperature is a fiction.

I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.

As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.

My portal to another world was fiction.

People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books.

Im omnivorous in my tastes, fiction and non-fiction, always several books on the go, though Ill read a novel in a day or two.

I think most people live in fiction...That's how you keep your fragile body intact.

If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

Contrary to common belief, Christian fiction did not begin with Catherine Marshall, Janette Oke, or Frank Peretti.

I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.

I've always loved sister stories in fiction, from the time I was little, reading about Beezus and Ramona. I've always wanted to write a sister story.

There's an explosion of Indian fiction of all kinds, from military thrillers to chicklit. I think that's exciting.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing.

No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.

At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.

The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.

Genres do exist because frequent users of any large bookstore can instantly tell what any piece of fiction is supposed to be about by its title, its cover and its location in the shop.

Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own.

The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

To newspapers and publishing houses I urge the use of fact over fiction, freedom of the press, and responsibility at all times.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.

Any documentary; any capturing of a non-fiction event, is a hyper-realistic condensation of reality that hopefully reveals an emotional truth. It's never the actual literal truth of an event.

Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets,lies,stories. We all tell them. Sometimes,because we hope to entertain. Sometimes,because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.

I am an activist. I have a really big pulpit with my fiction and I love knowing that I can make people think.

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.