Ya Fiction Quotes

What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job.

You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.

I shall speak facts; but some will say I deal in fiction.

One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.

Sentiment and nostalgia are fatal for fiction. One must go into the territory of the imagination with sure feet, hot fainting with glorious misery.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

...it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.

Fiction is the microscope of truth.

This is important. Money on its most basic level is a hard fact - you either have it or you don't. But on it's emotional level it is purely a fiction. It becomes what you let it become.

I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.

Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.

A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what's fiction?

I mainly read non-fiction, and that's probably because I have a huge amount of insecurity about my lack of education and the things I don't know.

One of the things I find in writing about people who are dead is that, after a short or long time, no matter how close the relationship was, they become like characters in fiction.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

Michael Winter’s fiction is a lot like hearing him talk about his life… harrowing in an after-the-fact hilarious way. Full of wonder and mystery. A hangover you wouldn’t miss for the world.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

I read a lot of lot non-demanding fiction.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.

I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are great writers don't have to write novels anymore.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.

Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

The imagination is too often regarded merely as an indefinite, untraceable, indescribable something that does nothing but create fiction.

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

In fiction there can be no appeal to any authority outside the book itself. . . . the thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement.

The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.

I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.

I think there's nothing more wonderful than using fiction to reflect real-world cultural ideas.