Fiction Quotes · Page 155

“...hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create - and…

— Philip K Dick

Actors endow the villain in fiction with a warmth and quality that makes them memorable. I think we like fictional villains because…

— John Rhys-Davies

I do think that science fiction ideas are best expressed through visual media like film and TV. Realist literature depicts things that…

— Liu Cixin

Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to…

— John Green

Journeys become very good metaphors. They always have the character put into circumstances that reveal him. If I had based my characters…

— Karan Bajaj

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated…

— Daniel Levitin

“If realistic fiction is primarily metonymic, fantasy is inescapably metaphoric; because the presence of the impossible blocks a literal reading, we are…

— Brian Attebery

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“People in books were always so charming, and all their thoughts and actions so comprehensible. They all invariably had a clear, well-defined…

— Lyubov Dostoyevskaya

“Was love ever easy for anyone? If less complicated, would this make it less appreciated? Perhaps love was difficult for good reason.…

— Roy L. Pickering Jr

“...Alex found herself reading of emotions and experiences of which her own seemed so feeble a mockery, that she was conscious of…

— E.M. Delafield

I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination.…

— Amelie Nothomb

I'm very interested in film making. It's telling a story, fiction or non-fiction. I have been filmed quite a lot. Contrary to…

— Stephen Hawking

My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I…

— Nicholas Sparks

Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery.…

— Antonya Nelson

The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much…

— Chad Harbach

“And it was then I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of…

— Roald Dahl

I had two competing ambitions when I was a child: I wanted to be a Scientist and Discover Great Things, but I…

— Suw Charman-Anderson

Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside…

— Vladimir Nabokov

“As we drifted away from the Tower Bridge, I saw a single silhouette standing against the bright lamplight. Even now when I…

— Erica Sehyun Song

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem…

— Lawrence M. Krauss

My first encounter with science fiction was reading the work of H.G. Wells when I was nine or ten, and I don't…

— Philip Reeve

'Seize the Story' takes readers all the way through the process of writing fiction, from beginning to end. Every element, from dialogue…

— Victoria Hanley

It's been suggested that most women fail to write significantly because the female mind is viscerotonic, and occupied almost exclusively with the…

— Alfred Bester

“And yet it was also true that the tumor could not be removed by our doctor, and as a result of that…

— Justin Dobbs

“It happens that in our phase of civility, the novel is the central form of literary art. It lends itself to explanations…

— Frank Kermode

Evidently, there are many great American writers. But sometimes it can feel as though American fiction is dominated by relatively linear narrative…

— Katie Kitamura

“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people…

— George Saunders

If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by…

— Jodi Picoult

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea…

— Amy Hempel

They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me that these are a fiction from first to last. O Reason, thou…

— Al-Maʿarri

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do.…

— David Foster Wallace

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to…

— Kurt Vonnegut

I grew up a really nerdy kid. I read science fiction and fantasy voraciously, for the first 16 years of my life.…

— Jon Spaihts

Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed…

— Anonymous

Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did…

— David Foster Wallace

“I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So…

— Paul Fussell

Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the…

— William T. Vollmann

Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's…

— Diane Setterfield

There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised…

— David Hewson