All Quotes

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.
‐‐ Vikram Seth

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.
‐‐ Ben Marcus

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

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.
‐‐ Neel Mukherjee

Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.
‐‐ Varley O'Connor

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.
‐‐ Steven Amsterdam

Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.
‐‐ Christopher Buckley

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.
‐‐ Paul Theroux

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.
‐‐ Jerry B. Jenkins

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.
‐‐ Raymond Queneau

Fiction has subversive potential. People let it into their minds, like the Trojan Horse. They don't know what's inside. You hook them with the story, and God can work below the level of their consciousness. Fiction can be propaganda for evil or convey a theme that impacts people for good.
‐‐ Randy Alcorn

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.
‐‐ Michael Dirda

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.
‐‐ George Saunders

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
‐‐ Tim O'Brien

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.
‐‐ Dan Chaon

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
‐‐ Dorothy Allison

Fiction is a report from the interior.
‐‐ Deborah Eisenberg

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.
‐‐ Miguel Syjuco

Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?
‐‐ Arthur Phillips

Fiction is able to encompass books that are bleak and which dwell on the manifold and terrible problems of our times. But I don't think that all books need to have that particular focus.
‐‐ Alexander McCall Smith

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
‐‐ Robert Morgan

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.
‐‐ Lauren Beukes

Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.
‐‐ Ruth Ozeki

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist.
‐‐ Hunter S. Thompson

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.
‐‐ John Updike

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

Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.
‐‐ Rick Bass

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
‐‐ George R. R. Martin

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
‐‐ Clive James

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
‐‐ Virginia Woolf

Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it's not the king any more.
‐‐ Chuck Palahniuk

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.
‐‐ Margaret Atwood

Fiction is often most powerful when the author is exploring an issue - and not writing like a know-it-all who has the perfect answer.
‐‐ Gillian Cross

Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative.
‐‐ Paolo Bacigalupi

Fiction is socially meaningful.
‐‐ David Guterson

Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.
‐‐ David Baldacci

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
‐‐ Alice Walker

Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time.
‐‐ Eleanor Catton

Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.
‐‐ Phil Klay

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
‐‐ Charles Stross

Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.
‐‐ Edmund White

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
‐‐ Stephen King

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.
‐‐ Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.
‐‐ Theodore Sturgeon

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
‐‐ Hilary Mantel

Fiction isn't memoir and memoir isn't fiction.
‐‐ Arthur Phillips

Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.
‐‐ Amy Waldman

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.
‐‐ Hilary Mantel