Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. — Ivana Trump
Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible. — Richard Posner
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus
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
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. — Jessamyn West
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. — Tom Clancy
That's what a writer does; they make things up and that makes for good reading. — Debbie Reynolds
Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire. — J. G. Ballard
Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive. — Karen Russell
The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty. — Edmund Gosse
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
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. — Mark Twain
History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders. — Edna O'Brien
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism. — Neil Gaiman
Short Fiction Quotes
Better to have a small role in God's story than to cast yourself as the lead in your own fiction. — LeCrae
I am no longer going to become a fictional character to please people. That's too much work. — Lauryn Hill
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
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. — Oscar Wilde
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. — Frederik Pohl
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. — Arthur Conan Doyle
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. — Leonard Nimoy
I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority. — Peter Matthiessen
The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion — Donna J. Haraway
Fiction Image Quotes
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. — Simone Weil
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Pulp Fiction Quotes
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. — Bruce Sterling
Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way. — Quentin Tarantino
Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character. — Quentin Tarantino
The universe wrote fiction is us. Its called Fear.
I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie. — Quentin Tarantino
If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions. — Quentin Tarantino
I think, for sure, 'Saturday Night Fever' and 'Pulp Fiction' were kind of bookends for - or the pillars of - my career. — John Travolta
Like everybody at that age, I read an awful lot of pulp fiction. But at the same time, I also read quite a bit of history and read that as much for pleasure as part of a curriculum. — John Hume
I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before. — Siri Hustvedt
You read a script and its based on 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Pulp Fiction', and it goes right in the bin. — Tim Roth
Pulp Fiction is a, uh, gritty, urban satire. Pump Friction is a uh-uh, a bunch of uh, dudes and ladies having dirty sex. — Norm MacDonald
Science Fiction Quotes
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
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
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
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
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
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
Fiction Writers Quotes
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers — Jacques Barzun
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself. — Harlan Ellison
I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists. — Kathy Acker
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
But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention. — Julia Alvarez
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. — Barbara Kingsolver
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his own deeds. — Harold Hayes
Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters. — Caroline Leavitt
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
Fiction Stories Quotes
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. — Ulysses S. Grant
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
Reading Fiction Quotes
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
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
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
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
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
Stranger Than Fiction Quotes
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. — Mark Twain
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction. — Lord Byron
This is your life. Now go make it the one you've always wanted. — Dustin Hoffman
I've played drug dealers, all my life. I've made a career of killing people and playing all kinds of killers. The violence and drugs is portrayed in exaggeration. This is fiction. That is how I looked at it. And, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Just open a newspaper. — Benicio Del Toro
Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that. — Michio Kaku
Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense. — Leo Rosten
The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational. — Sydney J. Harris
Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction. — Lord Byron
Fact And Fiction Quotes
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. — Hannah Arendt
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
Your job as a smart investor is to separate the facts and the news from the fiction and the noise. — Chamath Palihapitiya
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. — Chris Chocola
It's what we live for, to be able to make great illusions. The thing about 'Entourage' is everything we do is realistic. We go to the real places, we shoot on location. We get the real people. It's a perfect marriage between fact and fiction. — Adrian Grenier
An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences. — Rafael Sabatini
Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that. — Rick Moody
There aren't really rules for painting, but there’s certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They’re like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention. — Vija Celmins
Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts. — Herman Melville
Fiction Novels Quotes
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
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
I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book. — Elizabeth Hand
Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller. — Jo Nesbo
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. — Richard Dawkins
If you have to write a fictional adventure to convey a philosophy of evil, the best person is the destroyer of evil himself, Lord Shiva. — Amish Tripathi
The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel. — Walter Brueggemann
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky. — Flannery O'Connor
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning. — Susan Sontag
Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile. — Jerry B. Jenkins
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. — Donna J. Haraway
Literature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces. — Gad Saad
I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful — Kara Walker
I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction. — Judith Krantz
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut
I'm free of an abusive cult, based on money and power that worships a fictional deity and safely back with the Catholic Church. — Katie Holmes
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of. — Dashiell Hammett
I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction. — James Joyce
Fictions are necessary for the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance. In fact, what can there be in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? The Truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason. — Albert Pike
In Conclusion
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