"Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. And what are you reading, Miss -- -? Oh! it is only a novel! replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language."

Austen, Jane on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality."

Ballard, J. G. on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"Novels are longer than life."

Barney, Natalie Clifford on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future."

Baudrillard, Jean on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it."

Boorstin, Daniel J. on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence -- a lot passes you by -- simply because your attention is otherwise diverted."

Brookner, Anita on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist."

Browning, Robert on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not."

Burgess, Anthony on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 3 fans >>

"Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual."

Burgess, Anthony on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric -- and pure invention is but the talent of a liar."

Byron, Lord on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"Romances I never read like those I have seen."

Byron, Lord on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 4 fans >>

"Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top."

Calvino, Italo on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?"

Conrad, Joseph on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it."

Coover, Robert on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely."

Delillo, Don on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative."

Doctorow, E. L. on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe."

Eliot, George on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define."

Forster, Edward M. on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination."

Frame, Janet on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word."

Fuentes, Carlos on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry."

Golding, William on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it."

Hemingway, Ernest on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 2 fans >>

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."

Hemingway, Ernest on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 3 fans >>

"All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them."

Hughes, Richard on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels."

Huxley, Aldous on Fiction
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>