50 Quotes About Fiction
- “I like telling stories.” — Hunter Parrish
- “All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.” — George R.R. Martin
- “Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” — GK Chesterton
- “The best fiction is geared towards conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, when they are put up against insurmountable obstacles. This is true in real life.” — Sufjan Stevens
- “Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.” — Francis Bacon
- “The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.” — Antony Beevor
- “The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.” — E.L. Doctorow
- “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” — Mark Twain
- “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.” — Virginia Wolf
- “Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.” — Simon Weil
- “Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.” — Ray Bradbury
- “Human kind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.” — Jim Crace
- “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” — Albert Camus
- “I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
- “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” — Oscar Wilde
- “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” — Doris Lessing
- “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” — Albert Einstein
- “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
- “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” — Ken Kesey
- “Fiction wouldn’t be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.” — Jasper Fforde
- “General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else” — Marvin Minsky
- “Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.” — Charlaine Harris
- “The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing – and everything – about it is real.” — Todd Strasser
- “Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own “real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.” — Leonard S. Marcus
- “[Characters] are the beating heart of any story that’s worth reading. All my favourite stories, whether they be books, films, TV shows, comics, computer games, or any other kind of story you care to mention, feature compelling characters. Characters who are not just believable people (though that is vitally important), but who are intriguing, unusual, captivating and – most importantly – unique. Their distinctive qualities makes them memorable, interesting and appealing (even if they are the most sinister villains) and they don’t slot too neatly into cliched archetypes – damsels in distress, moustache twirling villains, reluctant heroes or any other such thing.” — A. Ferguson
- “Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” — Terry Pratchett
- “Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life” — Martin Amis
- “History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.” — Victor Hugo
- “Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.” — Daniel Keyes
- “A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.” — Isaac Babel
- “There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.” — Orson Scott Card
- “The best fiction is true.” — Kinky Friedman
- “To write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.” — Stephen Leacock
- “Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.” — Raymond A. Mar
- “It’s never too late – in fiction or in life – to revise.” — Nancy Thayer
- “All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‘the plot.'” — Margaret Atwood
- “I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.” — Isabel Allende
- “I mostly associated video game storytelling with unforgivable clumsiness, irredeemable incompetence – and suddenly, I was finding the aesthetic and formal concerns I’d always associated with fiction: storytelling, form, the medium, character. That kind of shocked me.” — Tom Bissell
- “When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realise that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less ‘real.'” — Jane Lindskold
- “In the best works of fiction, there’s no moustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy’s got his reasons.” — Lin-Manuel Miranda
- “I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.” — Steven Spielberg
- “The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‘Doctor Who.’ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.” — Terry Pratchett
- “I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.” — Taiye Selasi
- “A play is fiction– and fiction is fact distilled into truth.” — Edward Albee
- “All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.” — Barry Unsworth
- “Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.” — Arthur C. Clarke
- “Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.” — Arundhati Roy
- “I can make up stories with the best of them. I’ve been telling stories since I was a little kid” — Rabih Alameddine
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Andrew Ferguson 