for he had acquired, as time went on, the firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can one day materialize and see its fulfillment in space and time. - Stefan Grabiński
Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing. - A.D. Posey
Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory. - Emma Donoghue
Though often scoffed at by serious writers, science fiction worms its way into our cultural psyche in interesting ways, and not just as predictors of technology. Many of these writers translate the –isms of our times into imagined futures populated with characters coping with the consequences. - Frank Daniels III
I write fiction not for my readers and not for myself. I write fiction for the sake of those odd heroic characters that are contained therein. They are counting on me as much as I am counting on them. - Nicholas Trandahl
Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it. - Dean Wesley Smith
Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic. - A.D. Posey
For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true. - John Green
If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction. - Shannon L. Alder
Goodreads.com is actually about fiction not dreading goo. But I have a profile there, anyway... - Michael A. Arnzen
There is no fact or fiction, reality or illusion, there is only the trick of perception. - Debasish Mridha
Fiction is the evidence that reality exists - Max W. Miller
When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written. - William Gibson
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. - Nadine Gordimer
Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them. - Edmund White
I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.['s Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992] - Cormac McCarthy
Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction. - Christian Baloga
Fiction is life by design. - Mary Kittredge
...the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment. - Toby Litt
Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope. - Nadia Hashimi
Fiction though it is a fiction, should be written in a way that it feels like a reality, a reality every reader willingly or sometimes unwillingly goes through, until the reader finishes reading and sometimes even after that. - Arti Honrao
Without the dreamers who write science fiction and other imaginary material we'd still be sitting in caves ... if we weren't already extinct. - William C. Samples
All story fiction is both truth that happens and never happens. Fiction is always about humanity, even if no subject is humanitarian or even human. - Richard Bunning
We're living in science fiction, but we don't realize it. - Terry Pratchett
Hey, I write fiction. I just make this stuff up, unless I get my hands on some good juicy truth. You know the kind I'm talking about ... that stranger-than variety. - Dick Peterson
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. - Oscar Wilde
To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism. - Edward W. Said
In the same way mannequins resemble people, fiction resembles life. - Marty Rubin
Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison. - Christopher Hitchens
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have. - Flannery O'Connor
All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it. - Walter Dean Myers
Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible. - Rod Sterling
Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers. - Michael Dirda
There is no fact which is not at least part fiction. - Marty Rubin
Fiction is a great combination between experience and imagination. - Desi Puspitasari
We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction. - Orson Scott Card
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer. - Frederic Raphael
Victory is a political fiction. - Anonymous
The blend of fiction, bigotry and jingoism became known as 'yellow journalism.' Later, the phrase was shortened to 'journalism.'
I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction. - Ian McKellen
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. - Neil Gaiman
The Bible may be an arresting andpoetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should giveyour children to form their morals. - Richard Dawkins
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something. - Orson Scott Card
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism. - William Faulkner
Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades. - Diana Gabaldon
If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. - William Shakespeare
Fantasy or fiction is just a persons secret life. A world they want to be in. The only diffrence between them and you, is that they wrote it down in detail, printed it and shared it with the world. - Mariana Hak
The novelist uses facts to create a fiction about life. The pornographer uses sexual reality to create sexual illusion. - Marty Rubin
Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible. - Rod Serling
Writing fiction is a way of expressing feelings and revealing a certain truth about life, goals, dreams and desires. - Ann Marie Aguilar
Two kinds of writers. One treats the world as if it were fiction; the other treats fiction as if it were the world. - Marty Rubin
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. - Frederik Pohl
You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed. - Kurt Vonnegut
Fiction books give the reader a chance to step away from their own reality and into the shoes of the characters, and they show you a world that isn't the one you already know. And sometimes the story's not so different from your own, and it lets you get closer to your own feelings. - Shin Towada
Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction. - Clark Zlotchew
I’m a reader who uses fiction as a way of worrying about life. - Lorin Stein
The health of an enlightened and progressive society is measured by how vibrant is its science fiction, since that is where true self-critique and appraisal and hope lie. - David Brin
Perhaps this is why one reads fiction to begin with - to live a more interesting reality than one's daily life. - Steven Rigolosi
Take a scientific fact or theory, add a futuristic or other-worldly setting, stir in an imaginative plot and fascinating characters, and a science fiction novel emerges from the cosmic mix. - Yvonne Coleman
Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. - Mark Twain
I wish life were a fiction novel. Then everyone would have to do what I say. - Michelle M. Pillow
Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist. - Joseph Epstein
The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable. - Mark Twain
I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows. - E.M. Forster
One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. It would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it teaches the unconscious. - Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
I love when truth is stranger than fiction. It authenticates my wild imagination. - Joseph DiFrancesco
Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time. - James Van Pelt
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't. - Neil Gaiman
The most visceral science fiction always takes place in the past and focuses on the humdrum - Dean Cavanagh
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining. - Octavia E. Butler
Sometimes people say that we're living in the future, and time's up for science fiction, but I think that never will be, because science fiction really isn't about the future. It's about change and present-day concerns - Stephen Baxter
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself. - Eleanor Roosevelt
Most fan fiction is terrible. - Neal Pollack
I think the highest purpose of fiction is to show that all people are fundamentally worthy of mercy. - Tom Bissell
While the stories are fiction, the journey is real. - C.J. Peterson
When I label something as fiction, people say it’s true, and when I label something as non-fiction, people say it is made up. If something is not 100% true, then I label it as fiction. After all, there is no half of a lie, is there? - Robert Black
I have tread all three of his books and they held me spellbound interesting story. Its fiction based on fact...mmm I like! - Harold Alvin
Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting. - Susan Reynolds
Good science fiction starts with a question "what if...? - Franklin Clermont
An old adage warns: If you don't know your history, you will be forever condemned to repeat it. Likewise, if you don't know your science fiction, and heed its warnings, you could condemn the Earth to future catastrophe. - Kelly Steed
there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitionersof them - David Morrell
I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something…or something. - Shannon Celebi
If reality is as equally valuable as fiction, then you should just chalk up the parts of the past you don’t need to your imagination - Ryohgo Narita
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow. - Kurt Vonnegut
Science fiction is the one literature that deals with today's reality - that provides a basis for discussion and understanding of the complex events of our time. It opens the doors for students - doors into all branches of knowledge. - Biggle
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. - Simone Weil
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. - John Cheever
Fiction may amuse us, but reality instills lessons to be imbibed through experience; to 'live' this stark reality called 'life' as a blessing, whereas some foolishly waste it by following fiction and fictitious characters. - Henrietta Newton Martin
I love science fiction, always have, always will. But it’s the kind of science fiction that I love which I think is an important distinction. - Matthew S. Williams
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 toward the watcher on the shore. - Edith Wharton
Poetry is a way of coming to know the realness of things; fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships; nonfiction is a way of coming to know the world of the mind. - Kelly Cherry
Fiction opens a window of imagination that reality closes. - Deborah Brodie
Identity politics divides us; fiction connects. One is interested in sweeping generalizations, the other in nuances. One draws boundaries, the other recognizes no frontiers. Identity politics is made of solid bricks; fiction is flowing water. - Elif Shafak
...hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create - and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness - Philip K. Dick
Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable. - Azar Nafisi
When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction - Umair Siddiqui
Every reader can live One Thousand and One Lives; every fiction author can have One Thousand and One Masks, and their talent can have One Thousand and One Facets. - Lara Biyuts
Fiction isn't truer than life: it just makes a better story. - Marty Rubin
Fiction, however, sometimes ensures disappointment with reality - Miguel Syjuco
Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. - Jessamyne West
That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth. - Tim O’Brien
People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars. - Ernest Hemingway
Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station. - Thomas Ligotti
Those who say truth is stranger than fiction have wasted their time on poorly written fiction. - Mark Twain
I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness. - Philip Sington
You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion. - L. Ron Hubbard
Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction. - Orson Scott Card
Writing is about truth, whether it be fiction or a school essay. Don't give in and 'fake it till you make it.' Criticize what upsets you. - Bryant Loney
There's only about about 6 to 8 inches between an open book and a human being's heart. A lot can happen in those 7 inches. Perspectives, fresh perspectives occur and minds expand, and I love fiction and I feel like it's a possibility for transformation. - Aline Ohanesian
Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get. - David Foster Wallace
All fiction boils down to two plots: Either a stranger comes to town or someone goes on a trip. - Parker Bauer
All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction. - Javier Cercas
Truth in her dress finds facts too tight. In fiction she moves with ease. - Rabindranath Tagore
Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird. - Erik Meyer
Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. - Jeanette Winterson
There is no truth, only science and fiction. - Steven Brewis
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. - Mark Twain
writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible! - Mario Vargas Llosa
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. - Edgar Rice Burroughs
Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy. - Hugh Howey
There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women. - Joanna Russ
Commercial fiction writing – where my bread is buttered – is fairly straightforward. The writing is simply efficiency and story. The more you have of one the less you need of the other. - Joe Ducie
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it. - G.K. Chesterton
Fiction has to be well researched, properly conceived and logically presented.Reality needs none of the above. - Manoj Vaz
Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities. - Miriam Allen de Ford
An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction. - Victoria Clayton
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction. - George Gordon Byron
Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun. - Brian W. Aldiss
Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love. - Benjamin Disraeli
I believe in hope, in what is something called radical hope. I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r - John Green
Fiction is just that–fiction. Yes, it is serious business, but it should also be taken for face value. It’s entertainment. It’s escapism. It’s 365 pages of relaxation. - Rachael Wade
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. - Susan Sontag
Non fiction? Non fiction?! Listen, reality is what got me into this mess in the first place. - Justin Alcala
People are writing post-apocalyptic fiction like there's no tomorrow! - Cassandra Page
The best fiction is true. - Kinky Friedman
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history - Iain Banks
Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question What do these people have to do with us? and What are we doing out there in the world? - Kamila Shamsie
Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys' game. - William Gibson
Science fiction is the art of the possible not the impossible. - Ray Bradbury
(M)ysteries in fiction are seldom as insoluble as those in life, as most writers can't resist the lure of omniscience. - Dennis McFadden
I read nonfiction for information, fiction for truth. - Michael M. Thomas
I am a storyteller, spiraling fantasy and reality into mystical tales. That eerie space between fact and fiction, where only the brightest light can scare the shadows—you will find me there. - Sara Frost
I have a tendency to break rules and shake things up. I would say that with me people never know what is real and what is fiction. And I like that because reality is relative. - Nuno Roque
The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it. - C. Kennedy
A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content. - Theodore Sturgeon
I don't want to write soft, easy fiction; I want to write fiction that challenges. - Brian A. McBride
How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensation and my state of mind? - Douglas Adams
Transformational Fiction teaches how to assess, understand, and heal sexuality. - Anne Stirling Hastings
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong. - Neil Gaiman
I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation. - Chris Dee
Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. - Ted Chiang
Visionary Fiction speaks the language of the soul. It offers a vision of humanity as we dream it could be. - Jodine Turner
The truth was stranger than the official fiction. - Dean Koontz
Individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. - Annie Murphy Paul
The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it. - Frank Herbert
It's never too late, in fiction or in life, to revise.
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. - William Faulkner
We are now in a position to determine just what sort of science fiction story this really is. - Theodore Sturgeon
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction -- its essence -- has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all. - Isaac Asimov
When I write fiction, I struggle to decide the fate of two people created by my mind and spend countless hours to give them a happy ending. God, the Almighty has created infinite human beings till date and runs all our lives with such ease. He is the BEST WRITER of all. - Shahla Khan
General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else. - Marvin Minsky
Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today. - Herman Wouk
Faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction--faith in fiction is a damnable false hope. - Thomas A. Edison
Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies. - John Hodgman
Sorrow is a sanctuary as long as self is kept outside. [...] let us not foster, embrace, rekindle and indulge our grief. For then our sorrow is a selfish and luxurious fiction, a ground in which the Holy Spirit will not dig. - Frederick William Faber
One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy - William Gibson
Speculative fiction both requires and rewards an open mind. - Steven Poore
Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh. - John Cheever
It's Halloween, you can tell everyone you're going as your favorite Steampunck character.""I don't even know what that is!""Because your generation has no taste in speculative science fiction. - Girl vs Monster
Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction. - Raymond A. Mar
Fiction is the best the self-help book. - Quinn Barrett
On romance books: We might assume then that men, major consumers of thrillers, westerns, and detective fiction, enjoy being beaten up, tortured, shot, stabbed dragged by galloping horses, and thrown out of moving vehicles. - Daphne Clair
Sometimes strange fiction, becomes grim reality. - Wayne Gerard Trotman
Lying for lying's sake is the inspiration behind all great fiction. - Marty Rubin
But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger. - Arthur C. Clarke
Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.. - Gabriel García Márquez
I gave up worrying about the principles of fiction writing when I realized that there weren't any. - Teri Louise Kelly
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts. - Brian W. Aldiss
Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy. - J.G. Ballard
Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact. - A.E. van Vogt
Truth is shorter than fiction.
The past is fantasy, and the future is science fiction. - T.L. Rese
We [-women and men-] are all equal in our creaturehood, whatever our sex, color, age, background, or abilities. But we are all different in the functions we were created to perform, as different as water from stones, and engineering from imaginative fiction. - Mary McDermott Shideler
I want art that makes the world seem more unreal. I want fiction that can crumble the world and build it back into something new. - Lincoln Michel
If you're going to make a science fiction movie, then have a hover craft chase, for God's sake. - Joss Whedon
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2] - David Foster Wallace
My life is kinda like a story that if I told you about it, you probably wouldn't believe. It would seem like fiction. That's me. - Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan
The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously. - Richard P. Denney
As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust. - Charles W. Chesnutt
Good fiction often gives us characters in extremity, which ironically gives us a clearer mirror in which to see ourselves. - Sarah Van Arsdale
Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility. - Katherine Paterson
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
What we say about ourselves is always a form of fiction. - Marty Rubin
The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real. - Todd Strasser
Muhammad introduced the concept of such Glorious and Omnipotent God in Whose eyes all worldly systems are pieces of straw. Islamic equality of mankind is no fiction as it is in Christianity. No human mind has ever thought of such total freedom as established by Muhammad. - Mawde Royden
Don't be tricked by the verisimilitude into forgetting this is fiction! - Sha Li
When fiction has become reality, life may turn into a fairy tale or a firestorm. Tina, time has come to pull up one’s socks and start relearning and reassessing living. ("Another empty room") - Erik Pevernagie
It's fiction, the improbable is very probable in my worlds - H.Q. Frost
When superstitions enter the world of imagination, then intelligence and science become fiction. - Debasish Mridha
A novel, though fiction, often speaks to the largest truths. - Mark Rubinstein
Fiction inhabits the zone between the real and the impossible. The tug of those two poles is what gives it motion, vitality. Tethering fiction too tightly to the real produces plodding, lifeless stories. Letting it float too far from that anchor produces stories that are arbitrary and unpersuasive. - Vinnie Tesla
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction. - Gene Wolfe
If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it - Warren Ellis
Fiction is only fiction because it is yet to be proven. - Robert M. Roberts
It's 1am, I have fiction to write! - C.S. Woolley
Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning. - Arundhati Roy
That's science fiction shit," "It's only fiction until science catches up. - J.D. Robb
I just prefer my fiction with more teeth. - Jessica Halleck
The science fiction author, H.G. Wells was an avid supporter of eugenics and a believer in a hierarchy of the races. - A.E. Samaan
Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there. - Sara Sheridan
People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then? - Tad Williams
Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream. - John Cheever
Science Fiction is a safe, fertile arena in which to rehearse the potential scientific facts of tomorrow - Stewart Stafford
["The Devil in the Dark"] impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn. - Arthur C. Clarke
The human condition is such that we can only stomach so much imagination. We need for things to be labeled either fiction or nonfiction. There is no section in between. - J.W. Lord
There is no fact that is not at least part fiction. - Marty Rubin
Great fiction is the art of a soul. - Douglas Christiansen
Science fiction" means different things to different people. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra"—in which case the term science fiction has piled up a lot of expensive overtime. - Robert A. Heinlein
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written. - Tim O'Brien
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge. - Eliezer Yudkowsky
One is almost tempted to say... at last I can almost see a bond. But that will never be, for a bond does not really exist at all: it is a most convenient fiction which, as we have seen, is convenient both to experimental and theoretical chemists. - Charles Coulson
I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head. - Sara Sheridan
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. - G.K. Chesterton
Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives. - George Saunders
Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction. - Don Roff
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction. - Jonathan Franzen
For us, the playground of fiction is just as important as reality - Ryohgo Narita
Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love. - stephanie roberts
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say. - Raymond Chandler
Like all fiction, my lies are just my efforts to be truer than the truth. - Johnny Rich
If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.[Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989] - Max Frisch
Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know. - Walker Percy
Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical. - Frederick Buechner
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth," the long out-of-print science fiction writer went on. - Kurt Vonnegut
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth. - Khaled Hosseini
Fiction is the truth inside the lie. - Stephen King
Perhaps great fiction is in reality, deep hidden truths. - S.G. Savage
Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.
I want to board a train, and leave my books behind. I want to be so caught up in writing about the journey, that I forget that fiction & fact are not the same. The destination does not signify. - Hannah Harding
Writing fiction is one of the greatest forms of empathy. It's not enough to simply write from the perspective of your characters...you have to feel what they feel. - Melody Robinette
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses. - Stephen King
File under "Hard Truths": the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting. - Antony Johnston
Every writer dreams about the day they can step into their fiction and wander its hallways. - Shannon L. Alder
...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk. - Henry Jenkins
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible. - Mark Twain
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house - William H. Gass
I think fantasy is best described as a kind of fiction that evokes wonder, mystery or magic, a sense of possibility beyond the ordinary world in which we live, and yet which reflects and comments upon that known world. - Kate Forsyth
In the absences of a decent time machine, fiction remains the most sturdy vehicle for visiting other eras. - Tom Nolan
The trouble with lies was that once started, the fiction had to be continued, and it was hard always to be remembering details that you had made up upon the spur of the moment. - Elizabeth Aston
I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre. - Don Roff
Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men. - Friedrich Nietzsche
The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. - Frédéric Bastiat
If you can read the book and say, ‘Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!’ That’s Military Science Fiction. (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012) - Brandon Sanderson
Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much. - Tom Rachman
Steampunk is Victorian science fiction - G.D. Falksen
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies. - Lauren Groff
Sometimes the truth is so bizarre and mind bending that it must be presented as fiction to be accepted.George SaundersThe Bookseller - C. Robert Cales
Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities. - C.S. Lewis
Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable. - Michael McDowell
Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us. - Shannon L. Alder
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. - Iain M. Banks
I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction. - Sara Sheridan
There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. - Edgar Allan Poe
Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college. - Jennifer Weiner
Christian Fiction is like a parable. The story is made up, but the truth is brought to life. Enjoy the story, but savor the truth. - Mary Ann Brantley
History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt. - Guy Vanderhaeghe
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal - William H. Gass
Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction. - Sara Sheridan
Science fiction is when we see into the future of our planet, fantasy is when we believe humanity will survive. - Kaz Lefave
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. - Mark Twain
Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction. - Abhijit Naskar
I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction. - Mae West
I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things. – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11 - Walter Mosley
It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract. - Nicola Chiaromonte
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary. - Franklin P. Adams
In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction. - Josh Malerman
Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding. - Meghan Lamb
There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at. - Christopher Fry
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. - Tom Clancy
Science fiction is the arena of the not-yet, and every science fiction story has this element of not-yet-ness usually a bit of technology or a scientific discovery that we don't know about in the real world of the present but that might be a possibility in the future. - Welch Everman
I didn't lie--I was writing fiction in my mouth.
Woven words are little conviction when I present myself as a man of fiction. - Hubert Martin
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. - Tim O'Brien
Truth is stranger than fiction because lies are much more convincing but the truth always comes out no matter how long it takes. - Sanjo Jendayi
Trust me, I write fiction. - Rob Mahan
I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children . . . do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer. - Neil Gaiman
I'm a writer. I write checks. Mostly fiction. - Wendy Liebman
Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do. - Eveli Acosta
I write pre-apocalyptic fiction. In other words, I’m not interested in a future where everything is blown to hell, I’d rather write something that helps to prevent it from happening. - James Rozoff
I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away. - Deborah Meyler
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary. - Franklin P. Adams
It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from. - David Mitchell
The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true. - Neil Gaiman
Putting a piece of you in your protagonist adds depth and merges the worlds of fiction and reality. - Adam Steven Page
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. - Eudora Welty
It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word - William H. Gass
Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. - Oscar Wilde
When you confidently defend fiction, think about reality also - Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The line between fiction and fact is at times factual and at times fictional - Pushkar Ganesh Vaidya
The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction. - Gerald Murnane
My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability, as a child, to lie with a straight face. - Ashwin Sanghi
Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
The beauty of a thought is true science fiction. - Debasish Mridha M.D.
Give me FICTION, REALITY is OVERRATED! - Lily Velden
In an era where Existence is incontestable, Truth is subjective, and Reality is perceived, fiction must mediate between the three. - Henry Martin
In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer. - Adam Sisman
Day after day, week after week; writing great fiction takes time, emotion, skill and effort. - Carla H. Krueger
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't. - Mark Twain
I couldn't tell fact from fiction, Or if the dream was true My only sure prediction In this world was you. I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost. - Maya Angelou
Fiction can do more than entertain you; it can change you - Alisa Hope Wagner
We all move on from history to chance, sorrow to sorrow, hope to hope, joy to joy. Read the book of fiction on the theme. its title is FROM HISTORY TO CHANCE - Jamaluddin Jamali
[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it! - Terry Pratchett
There is an exuberance in good fantasy quite unlike the most exalted moments of realistic fiction. Both forms have similar goals; but realism walks where fantasy dances. - Lloyd Alexander
Never trust a fiction author. They spend countless hours making you believe in a world they created. They are among the best, most dedicated liars in the world. - James Ticknor
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? - Kelvin Throop III
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. - Arthur C. Clarke
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you. - Flannery O'Connor