Quotes of: Fictional Keyword

What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece

Fiction is overrated, Fly. We’ve discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that’s what counts.

Carnival: A Novel

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986

A Clockwork Orange

Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!

Don Juan

Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.

The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction

Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

...what distinguishes pulp fiction from great literature is how emphatically the work challenges us to interpret it.

The Golden Thread: A Reader's Journey Through The Great Books

isn't that dangerous?" I objected. "What if somebody used it on people - what if they put it on replace and turned us all into fictional characters?" "How do you know they haven't?" asked Marc.

The Grimm Legacy

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction

You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

On Being a Rat and Other Observations

The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments

The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the prese...

J. G. Ballard

Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's...

Jami Attenberg

Middle grade fiction, to me, is really about emergence of self. It's about expressing the idea that the world is going to start affecting you more, and your parents' influence is going to wane. Middle grade is when a lot of kids discover their passio...

Greg van Eekhout

One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.

Among Others

A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

I'll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison

What seems real one moment is fiction the next and gone out of existence the moment after that. Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth, and change our only constancy.

Judevine: The Complete Poems, 1970-1990

–It’s not Sci-Fi, we insist, It’s SF. Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

Conchpore is real. It is as real as Malgudi, Brahmpur, Lilliput or Macondo. And also as real as San Francisco, Madurai, Edinburgh, Gaborone or Tokyo. You know that fictional towns exist. You visit them all the time.

The Reengineers

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

Stranger than Fiction