Fiction Quotes - Page 26

• Fiction or fable allures to instruction.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Fables, Instruction, Allure

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• Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

  Virginia Woolf

  Two, Imagination, Facts

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3718, Delphi Classics

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• A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.

  Isak Dinesen

  Reality, Order, Poet

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• What avails it that indulgent Heaven
  From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
  If we, ingenious to torment ourselves,
  Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own?
  Enjoy the present; nor which needless cares
  Of what may spring from blind misfortune's womb,
  Appal the surest hour that life bestows.
  Serence, and master of yourself, prepare
  For what may come; and leave the rest to Heaven.

  John Armstrong

  Spring, Eye, Heaven

  John Armstrong (2011). “John Armstrong's The Art of Preserving Health: Eighteenth-century Sensibility in Practice”, p.116, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

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• A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

  Katherine Paterson

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• An old novel has a history of its own.

  Alexander Smith

  Novel

  Alexander Smith (1863). “Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country”, p.17

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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