Quotes about fiction

"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."

O'Connor, Flannery on fiction   

"The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town."

Ondaatje, Michael on fiction   

"When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him."

Pirandello, Luigi on fiction   

"Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology."

Roth, Philip on fiction   

"The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges."

Rushdie, Salman on fiction   

"The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins."

Rushdie, Salman on fiction   

"Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces."

Stevens, Wallace on fiction   

"Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of ideals, of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax."

Trilling, Lionel on fiction   

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

Twain, Mark on fiction
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"The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood."

Unknown, Source on fiction   

"I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people."

Vidal, Gore on fiction   

"Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith."

Vidal, Gore on fiction   

"There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies."

Weil, Simone on fiction   

"One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed."

Wilde, Oscar on fiction   

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"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means."

Wilde, Oscar on fiction
7 fans of this quote   

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

Woolf, Virginia on fiction   

"Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."

Woolf, Virginia on fiction