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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"My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian."
"I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction."
"Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation."
"A public is a necessary fiction."
"Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere."
"No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest."
"And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy."
"One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction."
"Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."
"It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is."
"This is a work of fiction. Still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible worlds is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe, it's not as fictional as we think."
"I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer."
"you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction"
"The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary."
"The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century."
"Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves."
"I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting."
"The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700."
"[Science fiction is] the attempt to deal rationally with alternate possibilities in a manner which will be entertaining."
"The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable."
