"A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories."
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Fiction quotes
Fiction
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Fiction quotes (page 14 of 90)
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"I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over."
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"The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters."
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"For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it."
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"Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making."
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"One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before."
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"I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises."
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"Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto."
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"This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society."
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"Im a devotee of Dracula, which was a pathfinder in horror and vampire fiction."
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"If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it."
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"I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction."
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"The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses."
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"Don't make a novel to establish a principle of political economy. You will spoil both."
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"Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them."
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"there are elements of truth in all great fiction"
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"I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you."
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"It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that."
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"Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?"
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"We live in a science fiction universe. We have done for a long time."
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