Fiction Quotes - Page 24

• It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sex, Thinking, Strange

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.614, Wordsworth Editions

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• We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of successive ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction.

  Charles Dickens

  Book, Law, Age

  "The Pickwick Papers". Book by Charles Dickens, Chapter 42, 1836.

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• My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

  George Santayana

  Character, Past, Historical Novels

  George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.62, Indiana University Press

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• It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.

  Herman Melville

  Ties, Religion, World

  Herman Melville (2015). “The Confidence-Man: Works of Melville”, p.171, 谷月社

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• Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town, to be sure.

  Herman Melville

  Character, Towns, Novelists

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.3049, Delphi Classics

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• That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.

  Herman Melville

  Butterfly, Character, Creativity

  Herman Melville (1988). “The Confidence-man: His Masquerade”, p.70, Northwestern University Press

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• The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
  Of final belief. So, say that final belief
  Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

  Wallace Stevens

  Finals, Belief, Prologue

  'Asides on the Oboe'

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• What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Truth, Mean, Reality

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• ... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Truth, Years, Two

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• The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Irrelevance, Criticism, Faults

  Elizabeth Bowen (1975). “Pictures and conversations”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• [My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Stories, Knows

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• ... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Autobiography, Bounds

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• ... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Crazy, Humanity, Taste

  Elizabeth Bowen (1959). “Stories”

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• The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Mean, Law, Narrative

  Elizabeth Bowen (1959). “Stories”

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• It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

  John Dos Passos

  Rams, Way, Path

  John Dos Passos (2015). “The Best Times: An Informal Memoir”, p.222, Open Road Media

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• I don't have too much time for fiction.

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Politics, Too Much

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• ... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.

  Marcel Proust

  Real, Character, Joy

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• In a way, being a Mormon prepares you to deal with science fiction, because we live simultaneously in two very different cultures. The result is that we all know what it's like to be strangers in a strange land. It's not just a coincidence that there are so many effective Mormon science fiction writers. We don't regard being an alien as an alien experience. But it also means that we're not surprised when people don't understand what we're saying or what we think.

  Orson Scott Card

  Mean, Science, Technology

  "Orson Scott Card talks Ender's game in rare interview". Interview with Shane Snow, www.wired.com. October 31, 2013.

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• The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.

  Gertrude Stein

  Truth, War, Years

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.133, Random House

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• No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

  Rebecca West

  Writing, Vitality, Half

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• A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

  Rebecca West

  Real, Fake, Criticism

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.161, Open Road Media

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• Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Art, Writing, Interesting

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• I know not whether the remark is to our honour or otherwise, that lessons of wisdom have never such power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart, through the ground-work of a story which engages the passions: Is it that we are like iron, and must first be heated before we can be wrought upon?

  Laurence Sterne

  Passion, Heart, Iron

  Laurence Sterne, James P. Browne (1873). “The Works of Laurence Sterne ...: With a Life of the Author”, p.217, London : Bickers, H. Sotheran

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• Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

  Neil Gaiman

  Lying, Telling The Truth

  Neil Gaiman (2016). “The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction”, p.15, HarperCollins

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• Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.

  Jane Rule

  Choices, Novelists, Plot

  Jane Rule (1981). “Outlander”, Tallahassee, Fla. : Naiad Press

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