Fiction Quotes - page 4

I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying. (Anita Diament)
A close associate of his gave an interview in which the book was described as quotes 'fiction from being to end'. I suffered trial by tabloid for a couple of weeks, lots of insults in the press, in the columns - this man should be put in the tower and so on. View quote
Anthony Holden
The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality. View quote
Chris Chocola
Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it. View quote
John Hersey
Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today. View quote
Paul Kane
I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer. View quote
Tim LaHaye
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science. View quote
Rachel Carson
The difference between me and you is that I do good fiction. View quote
Tom Clancy
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. View quote
Umberto Eco
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there. View quote
J. G. Ballard
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies. View quote
Simone Weil
To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour. View quote
Gerhard Richter
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. View quote
Wallace Stevens
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting. View quote
Gore Vidal
By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed. View quote
Gore Vidal
History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women. View quote
O. Henry
In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches. View quote
O. Henry
Partition is after all only an old fortress of crumbled masonry - held together with the plaster of fiction. View quote
Éamon de Valera
The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. View quote
Raymond Chandler
As a fiction writer, I don't speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms such as message are appropriate to expository writing, didactic writing, and sermons-different languages from fiction. The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction ... for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith