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"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."
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"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
"Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story, to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all."
"She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.It didn't."
"Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand."
"You can't burn down a made-up place."
"Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster."
"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
Explore more quotes by Raymond Queneau
"One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey."
"We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life."
"When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing."
"There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions."
"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."
"It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein."
"It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history."
"To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement."
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