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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"The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science."
"The purpose of fiction is not to nail you to the ground as facts do, but to take you to the edge of the cliff and kick you off so you build your wings on the way down."
"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives."
"You read a script and its based on 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Pulp Fiction', and it goes right in the bin."
"It's always great when you want scientific fact to get a really good science fiction writer to talk to you about it."
"Starring in a science-fiction film doesn't mean you have to act science fiction."
"Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it."
"The story of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, however, is a very important one, and fertile ground for fiction."
"Truth is more of a stranger than fiction."
"I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind."
"Science-fiction ... can be defined as: Imaginative extrapolation of true natural phenomena, existing now, or likely to exist in the future."
"I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't."
"Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger."
"No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature."
"Returning to writing fiction after 13 years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It's what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It's how I got my start as a writer."
"In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me."
"Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."
"Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good."
"Fiction is about what it is to be a human being."
"I was looking to do something non-fiction because I had done a strip, 'My Mom Was a Schizophrenic.' I really enjoyed the process of doing that strip, despite its subject matter. To do it I'd had to do a lot of research and reading and I figured I'd like to do that again."
