Fiction Quotes - Page 14

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it.

  Joan Larkin

  Writing, Stories, Crafts

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. October 25, 2013.

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• 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.

  Michael Connelly

  Giving, Use, Want

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• 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.

  Aaron Belz

  Real, Writing, Confusing

  "Cartographer of Word Galaxies". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. September 24, 2013.

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• 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.

  Jerry Stahl

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Interview with Jessica Jardine, Travis Hunter, www.avclub.com. March 5, 2009.

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• There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.

  Arundhati Roy

  Division, Concerned, Bookshelves

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• The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Sex, Two, Too Much

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• Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Single Life, Way, Possibility

  Nadine Gordimer (1983). “Selected Stories”, Viking Press

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• Truth is not always injured by fiction.

  Charlotte Lennox

  Literature, Truth Is, Injured

  Charlotte Lennox (1820). “The female Quixote; or, The adventures of Arabella”, p.261

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• 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.

  Storm Jameson

  Intelligent, Men, Careers

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• Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

  Storm Jameson

  Heart, Long, Amusing

  Storm Jameson (2011). “Parthian Words”, p.2, A&C Black

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• Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.

  Grace Paley

  Justice, Underdog, Literature

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• Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

  Anita Brookner

  Wicked, Moral

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• Wouldn't it be kinder to say that a lie is a short work of fiction? 'A story' as my daughter says?

  Helen McCloy

  Daughter, Lying, Stories

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• 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.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Law, Differences, Religion

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1753, Manonmani Publishers

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• We thought a magazine, even a self proclaimed literary review, had to be involved in politics. We felt sex was healthy and made (then) bold use of fiction and graphics so declaring. We operated on a shoestring and still got our issues out on time. In short, we had a ball.

  Barney Rosset

  Sex, Self, Issues

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