Quotes About Fiction

I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.

I grew up a really nerdy kid. I read science fiction and fantasy voraciously, for the first 16 years of my life. I read a lot of classic Cold War science fiction, which is much of the best science fiction, so I speak the language well, which is a commodity that's not easy to come by in Hollywood.

It's just science fiction so it's allowed to be silly, and childish, and stupid. It's just science fiction, so it doesn't have to make sense. It's just science fiction, so you must ask nothing more of it than loud noises and flashing lights.

...Don't let me ever hear you say, 'I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth.' Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of 'literature'? That means fiction, too, stupid.

Comedy is like fictional charm. It's the charm of fiction. Or the charisma of fiction. When you meet somebody who's immediately charismatic, you're attracted to that person. And in fiction it's got to come out in either one of two ways: in the prose itself, and you're hooked immediately because you never want to leave such a colorful and penetrating world. Or, it's simply being a funny writer.

So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.

I'm a little skeptical of so-called narco fiction, I have to say, though some writers I admire may have written some narco fiction. You feel the dread and the atmosphere in Yuri Herrera's extraordinary novels, but you'd never say that what he writes is narco fiction. The same goes for Martin Solares's novels, inspired by the nightmare city of Tampico, where he's from. Valeria Luiselli, Álvaro Enrigue, I know that they're deeply affected by what goes on in Mexico, but their wonderful writing points in another direction, though not necessarily always and only.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

I have never written a book that I wouldn't want to read. The trouble is, I love to read horror, sf, fantasy, mysteries, hero pulps - romantic fiction, in the original, traditional meaning of that term, as opposed to mimetic fiction. But most of all, I love thrillers.

But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

I think science fiction and sound is a really interesting thing. You might as well think of it as sonic fiction.

Im omnivorous in my tastes, fiction and non-fiction, always several books on the go, though Ill read a novel in a day or two.

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.

The beauty of science fiction is its open canvas. You can hypothesize about any element of the world. It doesn't have to be laser battles and things exploding, you can be JG Ballad and maybe just change one little thing about the real world and that becomes science fiction.

I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

On the plane, I like to read fiction set in the location I'm going to. Fiction is in many ways more useful than a guidebook, because it gives you those little details, a sense of the way a place smells, an emotional sense of the place. So, I'll bring Graham Greene's The Quiet American if I'm going to Vietnam. It's good to feel romantic about a destination before you arrive.

I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

The desire to be liked is acceptable in real life but very problematic in fiction. Pleasantness is the enemy of good fiction. I try to write on the premise that no one is going to read my work. Because there's this terrible impulse to grovel before the reader, to make them like you, to write with the reader in mind in that way. It prevents you doing work that is ugly or upsetting or difficult. The temptation is to not be true to what you want to write and to be considerate or amusing instead. I'm always trying to fight against the impulse to make my readers like me.

Fiction is most powerful when it contains most truth; and there is little truth we get so true as that which we find in fiction.

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

My non-fiction films are pretty much fiction, or at least close... It's all "movies" for me. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.

I’ve starred in a lot of science fiction movies and, let me tell you something, climate change is not science fiction, this is a battle in the real world, it is impacting us right now.

As strange as this may sound, I very seldom read fiction. Because my novels require so much research, almost everything I read is non - fiction - histories, biographies, translations of ancient texts.

I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life

When I am writing political op-eds, I do think carefully about the impact of my words. When I am writing fiction, it's a different story. In my fiction I am more reckless. I don't care about the real world until I am done with the book.

There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.

Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves. The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

When you're not doing fiction, there's a limit to how much illustrating you can do with your work. I mean, you can do fine. There are great non-fiction writers, but people aren't necessarily going to say anything that reveals them as much as a picture might. Even their surroundings, in lot of cases, the things that meant the most to me were the things I noticed in their houses. I was always looking, as much as I was listening to them. I was looking around for clues as to why I was there.

Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)

The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.

I'm not really a science-fiction fan, I quite like the idea of getting away from the science-fiction side of it, for two episodes. It was lovely, it was a super story and great fun.

I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.

The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it

I think there's over-telling sometimes, in fiction. For instance, I'm a big fan of horror movies, but I could always lose the last third of them. There's the brilliant exciting scary thing that's going on, and then they have to show you the monster, and the monster turns out to be a giant spider from space and then you push it over and it's dead. It becomes mortal and it has human needs and it always sort of feels like a shame. Maybe because of all the cop shows and such, we're a generation that needs to have problems solved for us in fiction.

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

I try and make non-fiction films that feel like fiction, so I'm always looking for the subtext and that's what really excites me.

I grew up reading crime fiction mysteries, true crime - a lot of true crime - and it is traditionally a male dominated field from the outside, but from the inside what we know, those of us who read it, is that women buy the most crime fiction, they are by far the biggest readers of true crime, and there's a voracious appetite among women for these stories, and I know I feel it - since I was quite small I wanted to go to those dark places.

I tried to get the word out to people who are information hubs in their communities, because they could propagate the call quickly. One challenge is that breaking science fiction means, well, breaking science fiction. Many communities of colour have a different approach to narratives of science.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.