Quotes on Fiction

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

Author: Kathy Acker

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

Author: Kate Adie

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

Author: Alfred Adler

It's always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It's more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs.

Author: Keren Ann

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series also shows the potential of lighter fantastic fiction. I read the first, and listened to a tape of a later one, and it's fun.

Author: Piers Anthony

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

Author: Piers Anthony

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

Author: Piers Anthony

I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.

Author: Richard Attenborough

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

Author: J. Ballard

I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me.

Author: Peter Benchley

A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay.

Author: Dirk Benedict

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Author: A. Benson

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Author: Aneurin Bevan

Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn't exist.

Author: Bodhidharma

It's not highly intellectual material. I'm dedicating it to the pulp fiction of the past.

Author: Bruce Boxleitner

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

Author: Harold Brodkey

I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

Author: Louise Brown

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

Author: John Carre

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

Author: John Carre

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Author: John Cheever

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Author: Gilbert Chesterton

His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.

Author: Gerald Clarke

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

Author: J. Coetzee

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Author: J. Coetzee

I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.

Author: Anita Diament

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

Author: E. Doctorow

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Author: Buddy Ebsen

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

Author: Ralph Ellison

Creating the fictional background for a game world isn't significantly different from creating a background for fiction.

Author: John Ford

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

Author: Antonia Fraser

If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.

Author: William Gass

I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.

Author: Ira Glass

Fiction is socially meaningful.

Author: David Guterson

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

Author: Mark Haddon

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

Author: Mark Haddon

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

Author: Mark Haddon

Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.

Author: Frank Harris

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

Author: John Hawkes

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

Author: John Hawkes

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

Author: Jerry Jenkins

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.

Author: Denis Johnson

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

Author: Paul Kane

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

Author: Dean Koontz

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

Author: Judith Krantz

And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.

Author: Tim LaHaye

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

Author: Tim LaHaye

I think it's Jerry's masterful fiction writing.

Author: Tim LaHaye

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

Author: Wally Lamb

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

Author: Tanith Lee

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

Author: Jonathan Lethem

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

Author: Jonathan Lethem

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

Author: Penelope Lively

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Author: Penelope Lively

I rather like getting away from fiction.

Author: Penelope Lively

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Author: Penelope Lively

Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction, created by Wall Street and the media.

Author: Robert Lutz

I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.

Author: Armistead Maupin

I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.

Author: Elizabeth Moon

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

Author: Robert Morgan

The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.

Author: Jason Mraz

I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.

Author: George Murray

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

Author: Graham Nelson

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

Author: Flannery O'Connor

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

Author: Ben Okri

I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it.

Author: Thomas Perry

Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

Author: Raymond Queneau

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

Author: Raymond Queneau

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.

Author: George Saintsbury

That's why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think.

Author: Walter Salles

I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.

Author: Walter Salles

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.

Author: Stanley Schmidt

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

Author: Irwin Shaw

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

Author: Curtis Sittenfeld

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.

Author: Steven Soderbergh

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

Author: Susan Sontag

I don't read fiction at all.

Author: Brent Spiner

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

Author: Peter Straub

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

Author: Theodore Sturgeon

I like going back and writing fiction.

Author: Julia Sweeney

I don't think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.

Author: Quentin Tarantino

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Author: Ivana Trump

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

Author: Irvine Welsh

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

Author: Eudora Welty

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Author: Jessamyn West

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Author: Oscar Wilde

A public is a necessary fiction.

Author: Rowan Williams

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

Author: Jeanette Winterson

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.

Author: Terry Zwigoff

Imagination is the key that unlocks infinite possibilities in a confined reality.

Author: Isabella Smith

Life is like a novel, filled with unpredictable plot twists and intriguing characters waiting to be discovered.

Author: Stella Park

In the realm of possibility, lies the abyss of perpetual opportunity.

Author: Ava Harper

The wings of imagination can take us farther than any plane ever could.

Author: Gabriella Stone

In the art of telling stories, we create windows into worlds that don't exist but shine with truths that resonate across time.

Author: Clara Phillips

The greatest secrets are always hidden in plain sight

Author: Dan Brown