On Fiction Quotes

The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are , they are not ...

Bruno Bettelheim

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

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Michael Cunningham

Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.

Charlaine Harris

The best fiction is true.

Kinky Friedman

History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.

Victor Hugo

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Khaled Hosseini

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

In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill.

Eileen Favorite

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

Tim O'Brien

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

Neil Gaiman

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

Virginia Woolf

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!

George Gordon Byron

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

John Green

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

Orson Scott Card

There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of. But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice-- those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.

Orson Scott Card

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

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

Orson Scott Card

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

Virginia Woolf