Fiction Quotes - Page 33

• What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscledsuits; dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.

  Edward Dahlberg

  Book, Writing, Scott Fitzgerald

  Edward Dahlberg (1967). “Alms for Oblivion”, p.68, U of Minnesota Press

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• ... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Mystery, Human Life, Concern

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.176, Macmillan

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• I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Mean, Able, Satisfaction

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.131, Macmillan

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• [The Muse of our Fiction of the future] will lead you - if you are humble and honest with her - straight into a World of Working Men, crude of speech, swift of action, strong of passion, straight to the heart of a new life.

  Frank Norris

  Strong, Passion, Heart

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• The motives to actions and the inward turns of mind seem in our opinion more necessary to be known than the actions themselves; and much rather would we choose that our reader should clearly understand what our principal actors think than what they do.

  Sarah Fielding

  Thinking, Mind, Inward

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• To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.

  Alexander Theroux

  Lonely, Real, Cities

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• In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.

  Marge Piercy

  Lying, Cat, Exercise

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• In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies.

  Berenice Bejo

  Dream, People, France

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The character is a piece of fiction. You are yourself, however, and that makes you interesting, because you're alive and you're a human being.

  Christopher Reeve

  Character, Interesting, Pieces

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• My wife, the actress Megan Mullally, was an English major at Northwestern University and loves fiction. Like so many things in my life, she curates things for me. For example, I have the daunting prospect of Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" waiting for me when I get through my current reading pile.

  Nick Offerman

  Reading, Wife, Waiting

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• It's certainly easy for me to make a fictional character mad about something. I can get them angry about something that I'm relatively indifferent about, just because I'm not educated on it, if I go to someone who is educated about it and is passionate about it. I find a point of fiction and then give it to them.

  Aaron Sorkin

  Character, Giving, Mad

  Source: collider.com

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• My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time. He was always so frustrated having to work to support the family that I was like, I'm never going to do that. I don't want to just be working a menial job to support my family and dreaming of being an artist. We learn from our fathers in that way.

  Rainn Wilson

  Dream, Jobs, Dad

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• There are lots of futurists that spend their whole life trying to figure out who we're going to be in 40, 50, 60, 100 years. That's the great thing about science fiction.

  Jodie Foster

  Years, Trying, Figures

  "Comic-Con: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster and Sharlto Copley Talk About Their Characters and the Themes of ELYSIUM". Interview with Christins Radish, collider.com. July 14, 2012.

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• Science fiction is the very literature of change.

  Frederik Pohl

  Literature, Science Fiction

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• Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

  C. S. Lewis

  Reading, Book, Interesting

  C. S. Lewis (1964). “Reflections on the Psalms”, p.107, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Visa for Avalon is a testament to the power of fiction. It illuminates the truth at the heart of what is commonly called reality. This account of lives transformed and ruined by the triumph of a totalitarian rule is a timely reminder of how moral and intellectual laziness and apathy can pave the road to the reign of terror brought on by such a system.

  Azar Nafisi

  Heart, Reality, Intellectual

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• Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Art, Average, Extremes

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2009). “The Crack-Up”, p.178, New Directions Publishing

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• Even if you've sworn to yourself never to read vampire fiction again, do yourself the favor of reading Motherless Child. Glen Hirshberg has crafted a compelling, heartbreaking thriller full of character, grit, and sorrow. Bravo

  Christopher Golden

  Children, Reading, Character

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• To only call Wizards, Aliens, and Starships engaging would be a real understatement--it is a delightful, funny, and immensely interesting romp through science and fiction. From candlepower to teleportation, all the way to the fate of the cosmos in the span of a googol years, this is a cornucopia of teachable material. It is also a reminder of the simple thrill of applying science to the world around us, real or imagined. A new classic.

  Caleb Scharf

  Real, Fate, Simple

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• We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Writing, Liberty, Facts

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Illustrated "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"”, p.325, Princeton University Press

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• The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.

  Henry David Thoreau

  House, Novelists, Bells

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.66, Simon and Schuster

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• The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.

  Lee Child

  Imagination, Today, Mystery

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• Ruy-Sanchez's works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry and intelligence in a new geometry of words... His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity.

  Octavio Paz

  Writing, Adventure, Nerves

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• Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.

  Norman Spinrad

  Science Fiction

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• One should not wrongly reify 'cause' and 'effect,' as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them, now 'naturalizes' in his thinking), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it 'effects' its end; one should use 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication-not for explanation.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Communication, Thinking, Purpose

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.219, Modern Library

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