Fiction Quotes - Page 32

• In science-fiction films the monster should always be bigger than the leading lady.

  Roger Corman

  Monsters, Film, Leading Ladies

  Ed Naha, Roger Corman (1982). “The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget”

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• If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.

  Roxane Gay

  People, Flawed, Humans

  "How we all lose" by Roxane Gay, therumpus.net. October 26, 2012.

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• I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Couple, Writing

  Source: www.nybooks.com

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• If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.

  David Foster Wallace

  Philosophical, Mean, Character

  Source: www.nybooks.com

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• I never have an alter ego in the movies. That's a fiction that the press has made up over the years, and it's fun to write that. It gives them something to write.

  Woody Allen

  Fun, Writing, Years

  "Woody Allen Discusses "Match Point"". Interview with Cole Smithey, www.colesmithey.com. December 20, 2005.

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• I would love to do more science fiction. I always envisioned the Riddick franchise as a continuing mythology, so I always imagined that there would be many other films to follow.

  Vin Diesel

  Would Be, Film, Mythology

  "Vin Diesel Talks RIDDICK, Balancing His Producer and Actor Roles, Making Good on Promises, HANNIBAL THE CONQUEROR, Future of Cinema, and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. August 28, 2013.

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• There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Writing, People, Interesting

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 3, 2009.

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• I think anything that opens my mind and triggers my imagination I'm reading. I like to read science fiction and imagine the character. Anything that keeps my imagination flowing.

  Nicolas Cage

  Reading, Character, Thinking

  "Nicolas Cage GHOST RIDER SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE On-Set Interview". Interview with Steve "Frosty" Weintraub, collider.com. January 5, 2012.

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• Horror is one of the few genres - romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind - that's all emotion-driven. It's not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It's irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.

  Stephen R. Bissette

  Two, Romance, Mind

  Interview with Chris Dahlen, www.avclub.com. July 23, 2009.

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• I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Opportunity, Thinking, People

  Interview with Donna Bowman, www.avclub.com. November 17, 2008.

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• If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wall, War, Taken

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.178, Xist Publishing

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• It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.83, Delphi Classics

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• We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel.

  J. G. Ballard

  Technology, World, Branches

  "Crash". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1973.

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• The unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Unity, Sitting, Literature

  Edgar Allan Poe (2009). “Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.521, Springer Science & Business Media

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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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• 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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• 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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• ... 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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