Fictional Worlds Quotes

• If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

  Richard Bach

  Real, Character, Practice

  "Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah". Book by Richard Bach, 1977.

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• We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had.

  Marco Tempest

  Cheer, Motivation, Inspiration

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• Having spent so much time in a fictional world, I prefer to read about the real world

  Brent Spiner

  Real, World, Real World

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• I love the idea of fictional worlds kind of all cohering in some way.

  Ann Brashares

  Ideas, World, Way

  Twitter post from May 21, 2012

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• Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited.

  Orson Scott Card

  Mirrors, World

  Orson Scott Card (2013). “The Ender Quintet”, p.1310, Macmillan

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• Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting.

  Norman Lock

  Reading, Writing, Comforting

  Source: therumpus.net

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• To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.

  Rainbow Rowell

  Life, Real, Nerd

  Rainbow Rowell (2016). “The Rainbow Rowell YA Collection”, p.549, St. Martin's Griffin

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• I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.

  Philip K. Dick

  Writing, People, Mind

  Philip K. Dick (2007). “Vintage PKD”, p.126, Vintage

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• Comics is all about making it believable and helping people to get completely lost in a fictional world.

  Dave Gibbons

  People, World, Helping

  "Artist Dave Gibbons' Gut Feelings on the Watchmen Movie". Wired Interview, www.wired.com. February 23, 2008.

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• I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.

  Frederick Buechner

  Character, Past, Creative

  Interview with Bob Abernethy, www.pbs.org. April 5, 2006.

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• My fictional worlds were those of a fabulist, of an intellectual fantasist. I was the lawgiver, and the countries and inhabitants of my imagination were answerable to me. If I wished for a man to levitate; to enter another's story by rowboat or by intoning a sentence or by performing a shadow-puppet play; if I wanted him to become a swarm of intelligent elementary particles and enter the Internet and travel into the past and far into the future, it was so.

  Norman Lock

  Country, Intelligent, Past

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It's so much harder than it looks - to conjure a fictional world that some passing wolf of skepticism can't just blow down in one breath.

  William Finnegan

  Blow, Looks, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It is perhaps both a blessing and a curse that fictional worlds spring into my mind nearly fully formed and it takes quite a while to sift through everything to find the story.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Spring, Blessing, Mind

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• It's not fiction's job to be photographically representative of reality. If I want to make a fictional world where there's no kindness, this doesn't mean I believe there's no kindness in the real world. In fact, what it may mean is that I very much value kindness. Like if you make a painting in which only greens are allowed, it wouldn't mean you don't believe in blue.

  George Saunders

  Jobs, Kindness, Real

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• Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.

  Antonya Nelson

  Real, Writing, Thinking

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• I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers

  Philip K. Dick

  New York, Writing, Reality

  Philip K. Dick (2007). “Vintage PKD”, p.126, Vintage

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• What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you're doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, "Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!" And that's how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.

  Neal Stephenson

  Games, Names, Creating

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• 2D looks so flat. Well, it is, of course, it's flat. But 3D isn't. And for an adventure story that takes you into a long-distant, fictional world, it's ideal, I think.

  Ian Mckellen

  Adventure, Thinking, Long

  Source: collider.com

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• Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in most. The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make this happen, and it's harder than it looks.

  Peter Thiel

  Dream, World, May

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• Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system.

  Haruki Murakami

  Writing, Trying, World

  Source: www.bookbrowse.com

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• I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

  Zadie Smith

  Sex, Writing, World

  Interview With Ian Mcewan, www.believermag.com. August 2005.

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• Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jincy Willett)

  Jincy Willett

  Real, Reading, Sleep

  Jincy Willett (2010). “Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather”, p.53, Macmillan

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