Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.
Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.
I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it.
The built-in form is a window frame. You can use this genre [crime fiction] to go where you want to go, and explore what you want to explore. In some ways it gives you a lot of freedom because you have a framework readers are looking for.
I don't really want to write fiction at all. I don't see why fiction is necessary when we have real life already confusing enough.
I think it's just too kinda juicy and compelling to imagine people in their private lives, but then half the time people's private lives are just so much more bizarre and Ted Haggard-like than you could ever imagine. It's almost hard to write fiction anymore.
the habit of generalizing from one particular, that mainstay of the cheap and obvious essayist, has rooted many fictions in the public eye. Nothing, for example can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, 'The French are a gay and polite people fond of dancing and light wines.
fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain.
There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.
The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.
The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.
Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.
Truth is not always injured by fiction.
It is more important to detect corruption than fiction.
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.
An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.
Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.
The letter of application ... should be a masterpiece of fiction, papering over all the cracks. Get it properly typed on decent writing paper. Never let it run over the page, people get bored with reading.
Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.
Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
Civilization is a fiction which becomes a fact only as long as everyone can believe in it. It is the cynic, rather than the rebel, who pulls down the whole flimsy structure periodically throughout history.
fiction and lies are both works of creative art, and creation always reveals the creator.
Wouldn't it be kinder to say that a lie is a short work of fiction? 'A story' as my daughter says?
Religion has no business to formulate social laws and insist on the difference between beings, because its aim and end is to obliterate all such fictions and monstrosities.
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