Quotes of: Fictional Keyword

Thus, she had learned a romance book was fiction. A hero who truly cared for the heroine was called a fantasy.

Show Me, Baby: 1001 Dark Nights

He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite.

Selected Non-Fictions

I think fiction allows us to sit for a while with people we would rather not meet.

Say You're One of Them

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

The Shadow of the Wind

These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe's world.

Osama

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

The Paris Review Interviews, IV

The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.

A Place of Greater Safety

disclaimer:This is a work of nonfiction, but it is also full of dreams, speculations, and shadows. Many names have been changed.

The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

Women's fiction is just a marketing category, designed to appeal more to women than to men. But there are stories in that category that any human being would like.

Wickedly Charming

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Your heart is known in Heaven,” the angel said. “And all that you are.

Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction

Q: What is wrong with the world? A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.

While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

They made a science out of people?" she said. "What a crazy science that must be." --"Mr. Z

While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden.

Dorothy Allison

I learned not to be so bitterly defeated when my fiction took a beating from editors. I learned in advertising to color in the lines and have my work done on time and to make it the very best it could be.

Jan Karon

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 thril...

Jo Nesbo

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

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

Hilary Mantel

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

Piers Anthony

Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from the circumstances of their creation, and even apart from the intentions of their creator.

Paul Di Filippo

The future of fiction? he said. Maybe, she said. Will it have room for, you know, love & stuff? he said. Always, she said. OK then, he said.

Patrick Ness