Fiction Quotes - Page 11

• In a sense, all fiction is experimental. Every new book is an adventure into unknown territory. As Hemingway told us, you (the writer) have to go out beyond where you have gone before.

  Richard Laymon

  Book, Adventure, Gone

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• Some people, when they're called before the police, like nothing better than to spill everything, fact and fiction alike, hoping to create a good impression.

  Kobo Abe

  People, Police, Facts

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• When I'm up for an award, there are usually two or three other things on the ballot that I like better than my own fiction.

  Kelly Link

  Awards, Two, Three

  Interview with Maggie Slater, www.apex-magazine.com. July 2, 2013.

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• Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.

  Kelly Link

  Writing, Occupation, Way

  "Kelly Link, Words by Flashlight". Interview with Lauren McLaughlin, www.sensesfive.com. June 7, 2006.

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• Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.

  Bentley Little

  Life, Real, Right Thing

  Bentley Little (2004). “The Resort”, p.300, Penguin

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• I often use detective elements in my books. I love detective novels. But I also think science fiction and detective stories are very close and friendly genres, which shows in the books by Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, and Glen Cook. However, whilst even a tiny drop of science fiction may harm a detective story, a little detective element benefits science fiction. Such a strange puzzle.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Book, Thinking, Friendly

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• Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children.

  William Poundstone

  Children, Expectations

  William Poundstone (2010). “Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street”, p.50, Macmillan

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

  John Carroll

  Ambition, Commitment, Moral

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.83, Taylor & Francis

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• As success converts treason into legitimacy, so belief converts fiction into fact, and "nothing is but what is not.

  Samuel Laman Blanchard

  Facts, Belief, Legitimacy

  "Sketches from Life" by Laman Blanchard. "That what Everybody Says must be True", 1846.

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• [Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.

  William Thomas Beckford

  Half, Literature, Dozen

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• 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

  Writing, White, Years

  "Terminator 2: Judgment Day (United States, 1991)". Movie Review, www.reelviews.net.

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• 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

  Adventure, Character, Epic

  "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)". A movie review at www.reelviews.net,

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• C.S. Lewis says that fiction is able to sneak past the watchful dragons of religion. It becomes more powerful to speak in poetry.
  The song goes straight to the heart while the numbers
  and the math of it will never be able to reach that.

  Jon Foreman

  Song, Powerful, Heart

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• Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

  Sara Sheridan

  Mistake, Thinking, Historical

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• Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.

  Tom Shippey

  Trying, Literature, Hard

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• Everything I had read in the fields of fiction and science led me to a single, dark conclusion. Humans are screwed, and so is our planet.

  Annalee Newitz

  Dark, Fields, Planets

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• Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

  Dean Wesley Smith

  Writing, Yeah, Professors

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• In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it.

  Frederick Lenz

  Drama, School, Contemporary Fiction

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• I took the liberty in Snowboarding to Nirvana to do a type of parody of what I suppose you would call "New Age fiction."

  Frederick Lenz

  Snowboarding, Age, Liberty

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• I enjoy the writings of all of these authors and they have been very inspirational for me. But I think that it is important as writers of metaphysical, New Age, occult fiction and nonfiction to not take ourselves too seriously.

  Frederick Lenz

  Writing, Thinking, Important

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• God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  Men, Intellectual, Liberty

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• I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

  Lafcadio Hearn

  Passion, Literature, Students

  Lafcadio Hearn (2012). “Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn”, p.23, tredition

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• I say then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain. This variety of terms, which may seem so unphilosophical, is intended only to express that act of the mind, which renders realities, or what is taken for such, more present to us than fictions, causes them to weigh more in the thought, and gives them a superior influence on the passions and imagination.

  David Hume

  Taken, Passion, Reality

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on several subjects, etc. New edition”, p.311

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• Homo religiosus invents religious symbols, which he venerates and worships to save him from facing the finality of his death and dissolution. He devises paradise fictions to provide succor and support... In acts of supreme self-deception, at various times and in various places he has been willing to profess belief in the most incredible myths because of what they have promised him.

  Paul Kurtz

  Religious, Self, Support

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• Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

  Lawrence M. Krauss

  Team, Years, Inspired

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