Decadence Quote by Asti Hustvedt

Legitimately produced, and truly inspired, fiction interprets humanity, informs the understanding, and quickens the affections. It reflects ourselves, warns us against prevailing social follies,…

— Henry Theodore Tuckerman

“Life is just as deadly as it looks, but fiction is more forgiving.”

— Richard Thompson

“Life might be stranger than fiction, but fiction allows many writers to more accurately portray life to their readers.”

— Jaime Buckley

In fiction the story lives the more everyone comes to life, the more each character seems to exist in his or her own right.

— Brian Boyd

“Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.”

— Neil Gaiman

“What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the unusual position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the…

— Tom Rachman

“Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous!”

— William Dean Howells

“Sweet fiction, in which bravado and despair beckon from a cold panache, in which the protected essential self suffers flashes of its existence to…

— Frank Bidart

“The hero in a romance is the most important challenge the heroine must face and conquer. The hero is her real problem in the…

— Jayne Ann Krentz

“As far as one knows of heroines from history. I'm capable of a great jerk, an effort, and then a relaxation—but steady every-day goodness…

— Elizabeth Gaskell

“If my life be not my own, it were criminal for me to put it in danger, as well as to dispose of it;…

— David Hume

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

— Nadine Gordimer