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Fiction Quotes
"CALVIN:Our hero regains consciousness at the feet of a sarcastic alien."
33
"I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction."
32
"And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured."
30
"I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out."
29
"Creating the fictional background for a game world isn't significantly different from creating a background for fiction."
27
"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
26
"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."
26
"If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine."
25
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."
25
"A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader."
24
"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."
23
"Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying."
22
"In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds."
22
"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
21
"Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets."
21
"Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality."
19
"If it's fiction, then it better be true."
19
"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."
18
"Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works."
18
"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."
18
"A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, head-less dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves."
18
"When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for the planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying."
18
"Are you naked?" he rasped out. Swallowing hard, she nodded."
16
"The alien in my uncle hand obviously taken full control. Soon, it would claw its way out of his stomach and tap dance across my bed."
16
"A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard."
16
"If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs."
16
"Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away."
16
"You can't burn down a made-up place."
15
"For some, vampires are still firmly in the 'evil, scary' column. However, in recent decades, vampires also run the gamut from evil to morally ambiguous all the way to fangless and vegetarian. I think part of their appeal lies in their versatility. Vampires can be the villain, the hero, and everything in between, all depending on the writer's whim. You'll also never hear me say that anyone is doing vampires 'wrong' because unless a real vampire stands up and sets the record straight, it's anyone's game as a far as defining them in fiction."
15
"That dress makes me want to do bad things to you." There was a long pause in which her sweet honeysuckle scent grew, twisting around him. Finally she spoke, her voice low. "What kinds of things?"
15
"What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage."
15
"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."
15
"Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.."
15
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
15
"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
15
"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."
14
"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."
14
"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."
14
"An Assassin, a real Assassin, had to look like one - black clothes, hood, boots, and all. If they could wear any clothes, any disguise, then what could anyone do but spend all day in a small room with a loaded crossbow pointed at the door?"
14
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