"The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs."
Read quote
6 likes
Fiction quotes
Fiction
1.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Fiction
Browse quotes that often appear alongside fiction — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Fiction quotes (page 9 of 90)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up."
Read quote
6 likes
"I believe that reality TV should be called 'not reality' TV; it's fiction."
Read quote
6 likes
"I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel."
Read quote
6 likes
"It is simply science fiction fantasy to say that, if you do not raise the debt ceiling, that everything is going to collapse."
Read quote
6 likes
"Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!"
Read quote
6 likes
"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
Read quote
6 likes
"In American fiction, belief is like that. Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer."
Read quote
5 likes
"If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact."
Read quote
5 likes
"Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore."
Read quote
5 likes
"I don't generally read a lot of fiction."
Read quote
5 likes
"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."
Read quote
5 likes
"With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow."
Read quote
5 likes
"Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive."
Read quote
5 likes
"I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy."
Read quote
5 likes
"Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture."
Read quote
5 likes
"I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself."
Read quote
5 likes
"Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses."
Read quote
5 likes
"Fiction has always been a thorn in my side, because I've always wanted to be a writer but I can't seem to really do it."
Read quote
5 likes
"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
Read quote
5 likes