Browsing Topic Best Fiction Quotes

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn’t exist.

Some years ago, someone had come up with the idea that the State should hold all Titles to vehicles, mailing a Certificate of Title to the ‘owners’. This created a legal fiction that the State owned the vehicles. Drivers were thus driving a State owned vehicle, mandating drivers must have a license to drive a State vehicle, which was false. The State reaped many millions with its drivers license scam, and began issuing heavy fines for not having a State license.

Fiction is an improvement on life.

Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, . . . for if a traveler doesn’t visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn’t be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn’t be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway.

Visa for Avalon is a testament to the power of fiction. It illuminates the truth at the heart of what is commonly called reality. This account of lives transformed and ruined by the triumph of a totalitarian rule is a timely reminder of how moral and intellectual laziness and apathy can pave the road to the reign of terror brought on by such a system.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

Whoever realizes that the six senses aren’t real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.

What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women … they are said to be dealing with ‘cosmic, major concerns’ – but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing ‘women’s fiction’ or ‘women’s poetry.

Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevation the State to the level of de jure universality

In the theory of evolution there is no talk of God and no Bibles are used. They’re not looking for higher powers, extraterrestrials, or anything else that could be found in the science fiction section, because they are not dealing with fiction.

People like Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and M. L. K. are larger than life to me. I find myself staring at photographs of Lincoln almost in disbelief that he was a man who walked the earth and not merely some fiction writer’s creation.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences – where things turn out better than you thought they would – ought to be in there somewhere, too.

Most fiction series are written so that the reader can come in at any point and not feel lost, but if you can start at the beginning, why not?

Those who say truth is stranger than fiction have wasted their time on poorly written fiction.

Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.

The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading – on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850.

Our lives are fictions, a work we leave behind, signed.

If you are inclined to leave your character solitary for any considerable length of time, better question yourself. Fiction is association, not withdrawal.

Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate.

As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.

But there are no institutions on earth which enable each separate person to have a hand in the exercise of Power, for Power is command, and everyone cannot command. Sovereignty of the people is, therefore, nothing but a fiction, and one which must in the long run prove destructive of individual liberties.

I didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.

When it [truth] emerges it often bears out the saying that ‘truth is stranger than fiction.’ A novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occur in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology .

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it’s vivid, I find that I care about it, and it’s part of me.

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

I feel like a sailor, or better, like an explorer of the immense universe of art. The artist is a discoverer in search of the keys that open the door to emotions and feelings . Art is the place where rationality, fantasy, truth and fiction mix up in a detonating mixture.

You can write a whole fiction, and you’re talking to people who have gone through that, in real life. But the truth of it is that when you’re talking to those people, you don’t care about your movie anymore. You just want to hear about what they have gone through. You want all of the details. It’s amazing.

I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.