Fiction quotes
1.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside fiction — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I may be the person who put "dieselpunk" into the conversation. I have always been a reader who reads in a really broad way. I read genre writers and I read literary fiction and I read books by dead people."
"Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories."
"Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority."
"You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction."
"It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written."
"Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas."
"I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true."
"Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness."
"Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks."
"Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children."
"Fiction or fable allures to instruction."
"Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel."
"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved."
"You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal."
"Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass."
"More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so."
"Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it."
"With the historical fictions, I was already doing so much research, and so much of the stories was anchored by historical truth that the move to nonfiction didn't feel all that dramatic - just another half-step to the right."
"How easy it is to tell tales!"
"Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades."
