Famous Quotes & Sayings

E. M. Forster

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

Don DeLillo

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.

Don DeLillo

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

Amanda Schull

Science fiction is one of the smartest genres around because you have to have so much forethought.

Alvin Toffler

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

Doris Lessing

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

Doris Lessing

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record,

Cory Doctorow

Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.

Alfred Hitchcock

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

Anthony Burgess

All novels are experimental.

Mark Billingham

More than 100 years after he first appeared, Holmes remains the template for the fictional detective.

Elizabeth Bowen

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Elizabeth Bowen

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Elizabeth Bowen

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Elizabeth McCracken

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

Denis Diderot

How easy it is to tell tales!

Gregory Benford

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.

Tahmoh Penikett

I love science fiction when it's well-done. I don't like campy stuff. I don't like stuff that's too fantastical.

Tom Bissell

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

The popularity of these programs has an impact. There is a blurring of fiction and reality.

Brent Spiner

I don't read fiction at all.

Bharati Mukherjee

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

Martin Villeneuve

'Mars et Avril' is a science fiction film. It's set in Montreal some 50 years in the future. No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it's expensive, it's set in the future, and it's got tons of visual effects, and it's shot on green screen.

James Altucher

When I was 7 years old, I plagiarized, word for word, stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.

David Gerrold

The first science fiction show on television was 'Tales Of Tomorrow' using scripts from the radio show 'X-1' which used stories from 'Galaxy Magazine' as its source material.

Tim O'Brien

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

Students who tend to read young-adult fiction are female. Most male adolescents read nonfiction.

It was just like an invasion in a science fiction movie.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.

Annie Baker

I'm really trying to stop setting my plays in this one fictional town in Vermont.

Alan Furst

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

Abraham Verghese

Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it's still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.

Colson Whitehead

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.