Fiction Quotes - Page 17

• 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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• 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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• 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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• [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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• 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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• Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

  Susan Sontag

  Psychics, Literature, Branches

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• Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.

  George Saunders

  Dancing, Gravity, Realism

  Interview with Andy Ward, www.slate.com. January 7, 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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• 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.

  Kate Douglas Wiggin

  Children, Memories, Wine

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• fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain.

  Isabel Allende

  Brain, Belly, Happens

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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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• 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.

  Louise Bogan

  Hair, Intuition, Stories

  Louise Bogan (1970). “A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation”, New York : McGraw-Hill

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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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• 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.

  Jilly Cooper

  Running, Work, Reading

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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 and lies are both works of creative art, and creation always reveals the creator.

  Helen McCloy

  Art, Lying, Creativity

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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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• Dave Eggers is a prince among men when it comes to writing deeply felt, socially conscious books that meld reportage with fiction. While A Hologram for the King is fiction...it's a strike against the current state of global economic injustice.

  Elissa Schappell

  Kings, Book, Writing

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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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• Honest fiction may be made to supplement the pulpit.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  May, Honest, Made

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• The importance of the romantic element does not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impressions of virtue to works of fiction; and Adam Clarke gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spiritual world; and he felt sure of having been a coward, but for romances. He declared that he had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbor and himself from Robinson Crusoe than from all the books, except the Bible, that were known to his youth.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Spiritual, Believe, Book

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

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