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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"A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first."
"Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly."
"Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all."
"Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all."
"Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them."
"Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on."
"My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops."
"Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't."
"I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction."
"Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own."
"On Stranger Than Fiction, the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page."
"But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along."
"Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form"
"Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing."
"fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain."
"Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible."
"The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death."
"Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny."
"Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory."
"I think most people live in fiction...That's how you keep your fragile body intact."
