Fiction famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.
-- A. A. Gill -
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
-- A. E. van Vogt -
Pulp Fiction' was probably one of the first films I ever saw that really kind of took effect on me. I was about four years old - obviously wasn't supposed to be seeing that film; my sister kind of sneaked it out and we got to see it. She's older than me. That was something I always used to watch.
-- Aaron Taylor-Johnson -
fiction is founded on truth....unless things did happen,people couldn't think of them.
-- Agatha Christie -
It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
-- Agnes Repplier -
I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.
-- Al Sharpton -
They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me that these are a fiction from first to last. O Reason, thou (alone) speakest the truth. Then perish the fools who forged the religious traditions or interpreted them!
-- Al-Maʿarri -
A fascinating book and a great pleasure to read: Betool Khedairi is a talented new voice in fiction.
-- Alaa Al Aswany -
I feel like science fiction is so much more mainstream now than it has been. And I feel like thats because technology has caught up with us.
-- Alaina Huffman -
All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
-- Alan Lightman -
I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.
-- Alastair Reynolds -
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
-- Albert Camus -
What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?
-- Albert Camus -
The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.
-- Aldous Huxley -
I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
-- Aleksandar Hemon -
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
-- Aleksandar Hemon -
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
-- Aleksandar Hemon -
I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.
-- Alex Flinn -
I enjoy women's conversation, and I think that helps me to describe them in fiction.
-- Alexander McCall Smith -
Words have great cumulative power, but in the 21st century, a single image is much stronger. An image suggests the unvarnished truth. That is its power and its fiction.
-- Alexandra Kerry -
The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
-- Alfred Adler -
In this case, the neurotic resembles a human being who looks up to God, commends himself to His ways, and then religiously awaits how the Lord will guide him; he is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
-- Alfred Adler -
Most science fiction, quite frankly, is silly nonsense.
-- Alfred Bester -
[Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths.
-- Ali Smith -
Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
-- Alice Walker -
There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.
-- Allen Ginsberg -
Fiction is the microscope of truth.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine -
Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.
-- Alvin Toffler -
This is a collection of dexterous, loving, beautifully optimistic work that left me breathless and delighted.... Hannu Rajaniemi's magnificent science fiction - as is paradoxically appropriate - is pure magic.
-- Amal El-Mohtar -
Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.
-- Amy Lowell -
I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left...
-- Amy Tan -
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
-- Amy Tan -
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
-- Amy Tan -
In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
-- Amy Tan -
This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.
-- Andrzej Stasiuk -
But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.
-- Andy Richter -
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
-- Aneurin Bevan -
Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
-- Anita Brookner -
For me, a kitchen is like science fiction. I only go there to open the refrigerator and take something out.
-- Ann-Margret -
I've only read fiction, so I don't know anything actual
-- Anna Torv -
Science fiction is becoming more of a diverse kind of genre.
-- Anna Torv -
With science fiction there's endless possibilities.
-- Anna Torv -
I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
-- Anne Enright -
I like science fiction. I took all the accelerated classes in school. I'm kind of a dork.
-- Anson Mount -
Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance.
-- Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury -
Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
-- Anthony Burgess -
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
-- Anthony Burgess -
If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.
-- Anthony Burgess -
The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
-- Anthony Burgess -
We have people being a little uncomfortable in their life on Earth with finances and so on, so Science Fantasy or Science Fiction allows people to think that there are possibilities beyond the gravity of our planet.
-- Anthony Daniels -
The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.
-- Antony Beevor -
Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery. Writing fiction, for me, is about putting on paper my obsessive interest in something mysterious. I may figure out the source of the mystery, the things that brought some action or image to my mind, but to make an equation of it would ruin the story.
-- Antonya Nelson -
Murderer who lives in my building. His name is Dan Bevacqua. Hes a fiction writer.
-- Arda Collins -
While fiction is often impossible, it should not be implausible.
-- Aristotle -
I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.
-- Armistead Maupin -
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
'There's no need for fiction in medicine,' remarks Foster... 'for the facts will always beat anything you fancy.'
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.
-- Arthur Helps -
What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.
-- Azar Nafisi -
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
-- Azar Nafisi -
Equality may be a fiction but nonetheless one must accept it as a governing principle.
-- B. R. Ambedkar -
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin...
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.
-- Bell Hooks -
Farscape is not what you call hard science fiction.
-- Ben Browder -
What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.
-- Ben Lerner -
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.
-- Ben Marcus -
Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.
-- Ben Marcus -
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
-- Ben Okri -
Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.
-- Bentley Little -
What we remember is probably fiction anyway.
-- Beryl Bainbridge -
Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.
-- Bharati Mukherjee -
In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art.
-- Bill Kovach -
When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It's like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?
-- Bill Nye -
Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.
-- Bodhidharma -
Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.
-- Bonnie Friedman -
Geoff Nelder's ARIA has the right stuff. He makes us ask the most important question in science fiction-the one about the true limits of personal responsibility.
-- Brad Linaweaver -
You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.
-- Brad Warner -
I am, of comics I was never as big of a fan as I probably could have been I suppose but I'm definitely a fan of science fiction fantasy. My interests were in fantasy more than comics growing up.
-- Brandon Routh -
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.
-- Brian Aldiss -
I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.
-- Brian Aldiss -
Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post Gothic mode.
-- Brian Aldiss -
I'm pretty instinctual when I write, and I really like to get to a point where I'm writing where I don't know what's going to happen next. Usually when I get to that point, something will happen that I find intriguing or interesting, or that will push the fiction in a way that I really like.
-- Brian Evenson -
The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.
-- Brion Gysin -
Science fiction has a way of letting you talk about where we are in the world and letting you be a bit of a pop philosopher without being didactic.
-- Brit Marling -
Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.
-- Buddy Ebsen -
For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.
-- C. J. Cherryh -
Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.
-- C. Wright Mills -
The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.
-- Camilla Lackberg -
Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English.
-- Camilla Lackberg
