Quotes about Fiction

She talked like that. But I understood what she meant. About having another you inside that isn't anything like you. Dorcas and I used to make up love scenes and describe them to each other. It was fun and a little smutty. Something about it bothered me, though. Not the loving stuff, but the picture I had of myself when I did it. Nothing like me. I say myself as somebody I'd seen in a picture show or a magazine. Then it would work. If I pictured myself the way I am it seemed wrong.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real.

What is a novel if not a trap for catching a hero?

You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.