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Fiction Quotes
"His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction."
198
"What we've got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
60
"Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike."
57
"Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by."
54
"But I don't want to write my own fiction,' Cath said, as emphatically as she could. 'I don't want to write my own characters or my own worlds -- I don't care about them. . . . I'd rather pour myself into a world I love and understand than try to make something up out of nothing."
53
"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."
53
"I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films."
51
"I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time."
51
"A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay."
51
"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."
51
"I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics."
50
"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."
50
"Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants."
50
"I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it."
50
"Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn't exist."
49
"Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic."
48
"I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction."
48
"One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey."
48
"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."
48
"There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take."
47
"He was like Superman, but with fangs and oddly impaired morals."
47
"I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction."
47
"I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me."
46
"Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere."
46
"Uh...are we going to talk about what just happened?" Victoria asked as Drake stepped over to Finn's desk to look at the map layout of the cemetery, seemingly calm about the fact that Bo and Nyx had just disappeared into thin air."
46
"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
45
"I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer."
44
"Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything."
44
"Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama."
43
"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."
43
"There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction."
43
"And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions."
42
"Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction."
42
"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
42
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