Books Quote by Martin Amis

Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

— Barbara Pym

It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

— Isaac Asimov

As entertainment, fiction may offer momentary relief from the stresses of reality.

— Joanna Scott

I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.

— Gary Shteyngart

“The term 'Erotic Fiction' is interesting to me. The 'Fiction' part. Cuz right now somewhere in the world it's happening just as it's written.”

— Gregor Collins

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters;…

— Penelope Lively

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to…

— Stephen Greenblatt

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.

— Charles Stross

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

— Colm Toibin

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate…

— Richard Dawkins

It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

— Vivian Gornick

My feeling about fiction, regardless of the genre, is that it is meant to be a representation of life. I want my books to…

— Richard Laymon