Fiction Quotes - Page 24

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

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Autobiography, Bounds

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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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• 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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• 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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• The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.

  Susan Sontag

  Book, Literature, May

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• The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

  Herman Melville

  Fables, Facts, Form

  Herman Melville, Douglas Robillard (2000). “The Poems of Herman Melville”, p.32, Kent State University Press

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• I hate the whole übermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of 20 really hard-working, intelligent people couldn't do the same thing.

  David Brin

  Hate, Believe, Hard Work

  "David Brin: Dialog With the Future". Locus Magazine Interview, www.locusmag.com. March 1997.

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• As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit - subliterature.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Moving, Years, Historical

  "Ursula K. Le Guin talks about genres, gender, and broadening fiction". Interview with Michael Cunningham, electricliterature.com. April 2, 2016.

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• It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it....I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that.

  Octavia Butler

  Writing, Thinking, Eight

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• You cannot be free if you are contained withing a fiction.

  Julian Beck

  Ifs

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• 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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• My feeling about fiction, regardless of the genre, is that it is meant to be a representation of life. I want my books to give a whole spectrum of experiences to my readers. Not just fear or terror or revulsion, but excitement, laughter, pain, sorrow, desire, etc.

  Richard Laymon

  Laughter, Pain, Book

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• Corporations are not legal "persons" with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.

  Kalle Lasn

  Rights, Corporations, Persons

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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 suppose that literature as it is won't die, science fiction included. But games are becoming an extremely important part of the science fiction world, including games that are adapted from books (or vice versa: books that are adapted from games). It's wonderful to have the opportunity to play and see your favorite characters on the screen, but the opportunity to read a book does not become less attractive.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Book, Character, Opportunity

  "Watching The Watches: An Interview With Sergei Lukyanenko". Interview with Nicholas Seeley, strangehorizons.com. November 28, 2011.

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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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• Isherwood did not so much find himself in Berlin as reinvent himself; Isherwood became a fiction, a work of art.

  Ian Buruma

  Art, Berlin, Works Of Art

  1986 Of Christopher Isherwood. In the New Republic, 4 Nov.

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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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• When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.

  Samuel Laman Blanchard

  Relax, May, Gone

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

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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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• 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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