F Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with F. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.”
Source: Falling for the Ghost of You
“Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.”
“Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.”
“Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.”
Source: On Writing
“Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.”
“Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through. ... That is why people read: to have experiences.”
“Fiction stymies me with its possibility. I can't see the bottom and I freeze, cling to the side, or just choke. In nonfiction, particularly that which takes personal narrative for its primary topic, I have a finite space and a finite amount of material. I can't fabricate material, I can only shape and burrow into it.”
“Fiction supplies the only philosophy that may readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world.”
Source: Becoming a Writer
“Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own.”
“Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.”
Source: The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
“Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.”
Source: When I Was A Child I Read Books
“Fiction that intends to be something other than entertainment has a certain obligation, I think, to convince the reader, every time, that what is to be evoked - character, experience, idea - is worthy of his or her consideration, intellectual energy, close attention.”
“Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.”
“Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.”
“Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.”
“Fiction transcends life truths in a manner that makes them inviting so that we might see life’s truths in a manner that makes them compelling.”
“Fiction was a myth. Fictional stories, that is. Maybe there were bad ones out there, but the good ones, the good ones - those were always true. Not the facts, not the rights and the lefts, not the plots, which could take place in outer space or in hell or anywhere in between, but the feelings. The feelings were the truth.”
Source: This Time Tomorrow
“Fiction was fine, but real life was the true freak show.”
Source: Emergency Contact
“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”
“Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.”
“Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.”
“Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.”
“Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.”
Source: The Well of Lost Plots: A Thursday Next Novel
“Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.”
Source: Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life
“Fiction writers can’t be trusted. They make things up.”
Source: The Self-publishing Manual: How to Write, Print, and Sell Your Own Book
“Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are "plot-driven," as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there's something artificial, fraudulent, contrived.”
“Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.”
“Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.”
“Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies”
Source: The Great Pearl of Wisdom
“Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!”
Source: The Left Hand of Darkness
“Fiction writing feels more honest to me.”
Source: God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
“Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.”
“Fiction writing is a twenty-four-hou r-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don't take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.”
“Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.”
“Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.”
“Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.”
“Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.”
“Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.”
“Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.”
“Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.”
“Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.”
“Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.”
“Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
“Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.”
Source: The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
“Fiction. . . . It's like goading a mongoose and a cobra into battle and staying with them to see who wins.”
“Fictional characters also evolve, the way human being do in real life.”
“Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.”
“Fictional characters exist in only two places, neither of which is on the printed page. They exist, first, in the mind of the writer and, second, in the mind of the reader.”
“Fictional comedy tells us that the writer is remarkable. Factual comedy tells us that the world is remarkable. I suppose I prefer to live in a remarkable world.”
“Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.”
Source: The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House