Top 595 Fiction Quotes

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they’re all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That’s what’s called American fiction these days.

‘Star Wars’ is more fairy tale than true science fiction.

And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.

Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines we’re creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach.

I also read modern novels – I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.

I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.

If I’m going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

I learned not to be so bitterly defeated when my fiction took a beating from editors. I learned in advertising to color in the lines and have my work done on time and to make it the very best it could be.

It’s part of a cycle of stories I’m writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

I made up my mind that I will do fiction in films and non-fiction in TV.

In terms of fiction, I’d rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

I’ve never been much for self-revelation. In two decades of public life, I always approached the limelight with extreme caution. Not that I kept my personal life off-limits; rather, the personal life I put on display was a blend of fact and fiction.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

As a storyteller, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories.

There’s no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

Science fiction encourages us to explore… all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is ‘write what you know,’ and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, ‘You can write about anything you can imagine.’

I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.

Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.

‘The Things They Carried’ is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real… I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

One thing I like about historical fiction is that I’m not constantly focusing on me, or people like me; you’re obliged to concentrate on lives that are completely other than your own.

As a boy, my favorite show was ‘Superman’ and my favorite movie was ‘Star Wars’ – along with other science fiction shows and movies. And I always wanted to fly.

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

Oh, I love to read more than anything. I always love the ‘New Stories From the South’ anthologies – I think it’s the best short fiction collection anywhere, just filled with treasures.

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‘Doctor Who.’ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

We don’t tend to write about disease in fiction – not just teen novels but all American novels – because it doesn’t fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

Science fiction is something I never understood.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.

Historical fiction was not – and is not – meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote ‘War and Peace’ to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe.

I feel like science fiction is so much more mainstream now than it has been. And I feel like that’s because technology has caught up with us.

I got hooked to American news like a great TV season. It plays like fiction. I would come home from work, and I would put it on, and I would stay up until 2 in the morning watching it and get up in the morning and watch it.

I’m open to reading almost anything – fiction, nonfiction – as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

I’m not writing great literature. I’m writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.

When I’m writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I’m watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don’t immerse myself in whatever’s going on in whatever area I’m working in.

They’ve also asked me now to start on another series that we’re gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it’s not science fiction, it’s more in the Mystery and Crime division and that’s another area I’m very interested in.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

There is an odd sense of responsibility attached to appearing in a drama about a real piece of history. A work of fiction is fun.

I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.

In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts… It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that’s quite important… truth with fiction.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction – by skipping the parts that bored me.

Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

There’s a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.

I don’t read Science Fiction.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.