top of page
Exlpore more Fiction quotes

"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."

"One thing I've learned about vampires--they keep pulling new rabbits out of their cloaks. Big, fanged, carnivorous bunnies that'll eat your eyeballs if you're not paying attention."

"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."

"What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up-Ho-HO! Now you've got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You're not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I'm talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it."

"We'd read about sirens in English this fall; Greek mythology bullshit about women so beautiful, their voices so enchanting, that men did anything for them. Turned out that mythology crap was real because every time I saw her, I lost my mind."

"Guess we're going north," Dev said slowly."Everyone, follow Lassie.Timmy's in the well."

"I write fiction""What's fiction?""Fiction is an improvement on life."
Explore more quotes by John C. Hawkes

"Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year."

"I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it."

"I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English."

"I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then."

"When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship."

"My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano."
bottom of page