Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible. — Richard Posner
Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. — Robert McKee
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. — Ivana Trump
Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. — Ulysses S. Grant
Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. — Jessamyn West
The best stories are often true...The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries. — Shonda Rhimes
Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better. — V. S. Pritchett
That's what a writer does; they make things up and that makes for good reading. — Debbie Reynolds
Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form. — Jean-Luc Godard
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. — Neil Gaiman
Every real story is a never ending story. — Michael Ende
Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form. — Jean Luc Godard
Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire. — J. G. Ballard
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism. — William Faulkner
Stories make you think and dream; books make you want to ask questions. — Michael Morpurgo
There is no story that is not true. — Chinua Achebe
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction. — Tom Wolfe
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. — Mark Twain
Top 10 Fiction Stories Quotes
Better to have a small role in God's story than to cast yourself as the lead in your own fiction. — LeCrae
Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters. — Umberto Eco
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. — Frederik Pohl
It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. — Erle Stanley Gardner
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it. — Bill Mumy
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John Y. Campbell
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. — Anton Chekhov
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write. — W. Somerset Maugham
I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Ernest Hemingway
Fiction Stories Image Quotes
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your own.
What Is A Story Quotes
Everything happens for a reason, and everything has a story, and if you take time to realise what your dream is and what you really want in life... whether it's sports, whether it's in other fields, you have to realise that there's always work to do. — Stephen Curry
If someone writes a great story, people praise the author, not the pen. People don't say, 'Oh what an incredible pen...where can I get a pen like this so I can write great stories?' Well, I am just a pen in the hands of the Lord. He is the author. All praise should go to him. — Keith Green
Try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story — Saul Bass
You have the power to say - This is not how my story will end.
Having a story is what people connect with, but the story alone doesn't allow you to achieve greatness and results. — Lewis Howes
I think human beings have evolved to appreciate narrative, in the same way that we have evolved to learn language. What is narrative, after all, but a kind of super-language, where stories, like words, are ways of encapsulating information? — Alex Epstein
I will not agree to go to war in the Donbass. I know there are a lot of hotheads, especially those who hold rallies and say, 'Let's go fight and win it all back!' But at what price? What is the cost? It's another story of lives and land. And I won't do it. — Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Behind every girl's favorite song there is an untold story.
Mary Kom is a woman who stood up alone in a male-dominated field and fought for her rights and what she believed in. Her story is an inspiration for every young person out there. — Priyanka Chopra
My story is definitely going to be a happily ever after, no matter what. — Rihanna
There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place. — Tim Cahill
Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity - or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories. — Robert J. Shiller
Different Stories Quotes
When I came back, after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted. Now what's the difference? — Jesse Owens
One of my favorite stories was Black Orchid, because it was so different from all the others. I especially enjoyed dancing the Charleston. I have always been keen on dancing. — Sarah Sutton
Every time I’ve listened to the wife’s side of the story, the mother-in-law’s side of the story and most importantly, a completely different story from the sandwiched man … one thing has been a constant - ‘I am right; the other is wrong. Endorse it. — Mahatria Ra
One bad chapter does not mean your story is over.
If you take different mythologies from different cultures, the names may change and the story lines may vary but there is always something in common. — Maynard James Keenan
While every refugee's story is different and their anguish personal, they all share a common thread of uncommon courage - the courage not only to survive, but to persevere and rebuild their shattered lives. — Antonio Guterres
Do not judge my story by the chapter you walked in on.
When we look back in 20 years, the winners amongst millennials and gen z will all tell different stories. But the one part of the story that will be the same will be the part where they deleted ig and generally silenced notifs from social media apps. — Chamath Palihapitiya
To say that I am organized is an understatement, but my car tells a different story. — Emily Procter
We have different experiences, but trans women have experiences that do parallel with the whole fabric of what womanhood is. Embracing trans women, listening to their stories, enriches what womanhood is. It expands it and makes it even better. — Janet Mock
To vary your inspiration, consider varying your inputs. Turn the sound off to watch a film, listen to the same song on repeat, read only the first word of each sentence in a short story, arrange stones by size or color, learn to lucid dream. Break habits. Look for differences. Notice connections. — Rick Rubin
Fantasy Stories Quotes
It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers. — Patrick Rothfuss
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? — J. R. R. Tolkien
When I write a story, I just wanna tell you what's in my head. It can come from real life and then turn into fantasy, stuff just rhyming. And write about what you know. I just like to tell stories that have not been told or [told] from my perspective. — Nas
You Can, end of story !
It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. — Patrick Rothfuss
You spend all this time, as a child, coming up with these fantasy stories, and here I am, sleeping in a treehouse, in the middle of Canyon de Chelly, shooting a Western. That's a bit of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. — James Badge Dale
I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms. — Manuel Puig
Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.
The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they may be unconscious. — Sayings
I was always fascinated by fairy stories, fantasy, you know, demons, necromancers, gods and goddesses, everything that is out of our kin and out of our everyday world. I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am. — Christopher Lee
I loved fantasy, but I particularly loved the stories in which somebody got out of where they were and into somewhere better - as in the Chronicles Of Narnia, The Wizard Of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth, the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. — Lev Grossman
If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story. — Terry Pratchett
Fiction Novels Quotes
My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky. — Alan Moore
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
Oh, I’m nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I’m nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I’m working on right now. It’s a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it’s going to be fun. — Billy Campbell
Your past is just a story, and once you realise this, It has not power over you.
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. — Jon Scieszka
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something. — Orson Scott Card
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message. — Jerry B. Jenkins
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. — Gustave Flaubert
Africa’s story has been written by others; we need to own our problems and solutions and write our story. — Paul Kagame
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
You know my name. Not my story.
You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born. — Anne Lamott
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. — Raymond Carver
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. — Ursula K. Le Guin
People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.
I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks. — Maeve Binchy
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice. — Octavia Butler
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. — Edgar Allan Poe
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. — Joan D. Vinge
All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction. — Steve Almond
Simply put, Redeeming Love is the most powerful work of fiction you will ever read. — Liz Curtis Higgs
As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography. — Norman Spinrad
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me. — Jonathan Lethem
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. — Philip Roth
Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin. — Ann Patchett
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. — Flannery O'Connor
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen — Rita Rudner
Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction. — Arthur Golden
Strange Stories Quotes
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
That's the strange thing about a good story. No pleasure if you can't share it. — Carsten Jensen
Strange medical news from Pakistan: A man had a successful organ transplant with a dog. They gave the man a dog's organ. In a related story today, Keith Richards was seen chasing a mailman. — Craig Kilborn
Whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with the world. — Stanley Hauerwas
American Horror Story re-energized me; it re-energized my career. There’s no shame in recognizing that. It’s exposed me to a whole new generation, which is a little strange. I’m not used to young people thinking I’m cool. — Jessica Lange
Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look. — Diana Wynne Jones
....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future. — Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... If we don't tell strange stories, when something strange happens we won't believe it. — Shannon Hale
Vanity is a strong temptation to lying; it makes people magnify their merit, over flourish their family, and tell strange stories of their interest and acquaintance. — Jeremy Collier
Money is the driving force of Hand to Mouth, the lack of money, and all those true stories about strange things in The Red Notebook, coincidences and unlikely events, surprise, the unexpected. — Paul Auster
Science Fiction Quotes
What might sound like science fiction elsewhere in the world at DARPA was future science. — Annie Jacobsen
You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion. — L. Ron Hubbard
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. — Frederik Pohl
20 years ago, all of this [artificial intelligence] was science fiction. 10 years ago, it was a dream. Today, we are living it. — Jensen Huang
Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one. — Walter Jon Williams
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. — Leonard Nimoy
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that. — Kevin J. Anderson
The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion — Donna J. Haraway
Virtual reality, all the A.I. work we do, all the robotics work we do - we're as close to realizing science fiction as it gets. — Jensen Huang
Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet. — Vinton Cerf
Short Story Quotes
Sail the main course in a simple sturdy craft. Keep her well stocked with short stories and long laughs. Go fast enough to get there but slow enough to see. Moderation seems to be the key. — Jimmy Buffett
I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium. — Lynn Abbey
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout. — Julio Cortazar
Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself. — Brian D. McLaren
Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. — Ray Bradbury
A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters — Julio Cortazar
A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the pa — Ambrose Bierce
My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor. — Gene Wilder
Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined. — Paolo Bacigalupi
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side. — Emma Donoghue
Science-fiction Quotes
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out. — Stephen Hawking
To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction. — Nawal El Saadawi
Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries. — Lawrence M. Krauss
I've been getting a lot of science fiction scripts which contained variations on my 'Star Trek' character and I've been turning them down. I strongly feel that the next role I do, I should not be wearing spandex. — Marina Sirtis
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person. — Elizabeth Moon
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. — Theodore Sturgeon
Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics. — Jean M. Auel
I did one sci-fi movie. I did 'Gattaca.' I liked 'Gattaca' because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi. — Ethan Hawke
I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it. — Jean M. Auel
Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction. — Francis William Aston
I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. — Martin Amis
My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction. — Melissa Gilbert
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best. — Linwood Barclay
Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. — Henry Jenkins
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it. — Harlan Ellison
Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning. — Arundhati Roy
I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. ... I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. — Ray Bradbury
My fiction is a very accurate reflection of the world we live in. Certainly, in some stories, that reflection is amplified but America elected a man who enjoys grabbing women by their pussies. — Roxane Gay
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me. — Alice Munro
Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming? — Eudora Welty
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about. — Alice Munro
Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real. — Arundhati Roy
The mysteriousness and mystique of space is such, that science fiction attempts to tantalize you by telling you a story that could possibly be out there and that's the appeal of science fiction. — William Shatner
I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape. — Frazier Glenn Miller, Jr.
In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story. — Ben Bova
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any. — Orson Scott Card
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story. — Wilkie Collins
Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story. — Patricia Hampl
One of my standard - and fairly true - responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story. — Roger Zelazny
People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip. — Lorrie Moore
The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band. — Philip K. Dick
A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem. — Ray Bradbury
There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog. — Vladimir Nabokov
I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain. — Meryl Streep
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts. — Brian Aldiss
'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia. — Veronica Roth
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. — Vladimir Nabokov
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. — Arthur C. Clarke
We must quit living vicariously through the fictional lives of TV and movie characters, and become the stars of our own real-life stories of adventure and creativity. — Bryant H. McGill
In Conclusion
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