Fiction Quotes - Page 13

• The parable of the prodigal son, the most beautiful fiction that ever was invented; our Saviour's speech to His disciples, with which He closed His earthly ministrations, full of the sublimest dignity and tenderest affection, surpass everything that I ever read; and like the spirit by which they were dictated, fly directly to the heart.

  William Cowper

  Bible, Beautiful, Heart

  William Cowper (1862). “Letters of William Cowper; being a selection from his correspondence: with a sketch of his life, and biographical notices of his correspondents. [With a portrait.]”, p.54

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• without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Book, Blow, Wind

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Revenge, Reality, Literature

  Simone de Beauvoir (2016). “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter”, p.34, HarperCollins

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• Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Dream, Fairy Tale, Tales

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1858). “The complete works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an introductory essay upon his philosophical and theological opinions”, p.269

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• History is an agreed-upon fiction.

  Diane Ackerman

  History

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “A Natural History of Love: Author of the National Bestseller A Natural History of the Senses”, p.7, Vintage

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• Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.

  Michael Bierut

  Design, Facts, Graphic

  Michael Bierut (2012). “Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design”, p.168, Chronicle Books

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• This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.

  Andrzej Stasiuk

  Country, Names, Assuming

  Andrzej Stasiuk (2009). “Fado”

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• It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

  Margaret Atwood

  Curiosity, Want, Form

  Margaret Atwood (1990). “Margaret Atwood: Conversations”, Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press

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• In merest prudence men should teach . . .
  That science ranks as monstrous things
  Two pairs of upper limbs; so wings--
  E'en Angel's wings!--are fictions.

  Henry Austin Dobson

  Angel, Men, Wings

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• It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Males, Paradox

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• 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.

  Muriel Spark

  Mind, Facts, Kind

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• It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.

  Agnes Repplier

  Office, Novelists, Teach

  Agnes Repplier (1891). “Points of View”, Boston Houghton, Mifflin 1893.

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• for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Art, Purpose, My Own

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1938). “Works”

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• Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Reality, Imagination

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, Pamela R. Matthews (2005). “Perfect Companionship: Ellen Glasgow's Selected Correspondence with Women”, p.161, University of Virginia Press

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• Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Weather, Rely Upon, Literature

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1938). “Works”

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• gossip ... is only fiction produced by non-professionals.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Gossip

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• Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.

  Patricia Hampl

  Expanding Universe, Mind, Wish

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• [Moralistic] novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: children never believe them, because they make everything that happens relate to the lesson at hand.

  Madame de Stael

  Teacher, Children, Believe

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• in the press, my sex life was something else again. I was Lady Bountiful of the Sheets. Some of the best fiction of the Sixties was written about my amorous adventures with an assortment of lovers who could have only been chosen by a berserk random sampler.

  Doris Day

  Sex, Adventure, Lovers

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• Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Real, Dragons, Insanity

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.84, Ultramarine Publishing

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• Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  People, Trying, Way

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.170, Grove Press

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• the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Art, Class, Facts

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• Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.

  Fay Weldon

  Understanding, Literature, Information

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• Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

  Fay Weldon

  Elements, Literature, Subversive

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• The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

  Susan Sontag

  History, Crowds, Obliged

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.92, Macmillan

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