Home / Topics / Fiction Quotes

Fiction Quotes

Browse 6707 quotes about Fiction.

Fiction Quotes

“Let me roughly divide books into those which compete with the movies and those with which the movies cannot compete. They are the books that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation of human life. If they are serious works of nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.”

Ifs Humans Book Fiction Serious Fine Let Me Appreciation Human Life Divides Nonfiction Enlightening Serious Work

Author:Mortimer Adler

“... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.”

Humans Fiction Mystery Concern Human Life Fiction Writers

Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“In a dispassionate comparison of the relative values of human and robotic spaceflight, the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure. But only a tiny number of Earth's six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable.”

“An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!”

Firsts Humans Long Important Fiction Careers Novel Written Sells Notes Average Bunch Factors Human Life Novelists Acquire Forty Take Time Format

Author:Charles Stross

“Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.”

Knows Humans Mean Stories Lying Fiction Agree Human Life Conventions Conform Tempted Chekhov Beginnings And Endings

Book:Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

“I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'”

World Firsts Humans Kind Stories Individual Social Fiction Reader Fit Details Human Life Internals Affected Jane Smiley

Author:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.”

“Of course, it's always difficult to disentangle fact from fiction in relation to, e.g., the singularity project. Many scientists I know are dismissive of transhumanist claims, BUT the last 100 years has surely taught us never to underestimate the pace and scope of scientific progress. However, even if much of this turns out to be science-fiction, it also reveals a way of thinking about human life that I find deeply troubling.”

“The variety within Mann's fiction is impressive and fascinating. But Joyce is even more various and many-sided. He begins his career with a wonderful sequence of bleak studies about the ways in which human lives can go awry - in my view, Dubliners is underrated.”

Way Humans Views Fiction Careers Study Wonderful Various Variety Human Life Fascinating Sequence Impressive Bleak Underrated Joyce

Author:Philip Kitcher

“I think that people have expectations of themselves and other people that are based on these fictions that are presented to them as the way human life and relationships could be, in some sort of weird, ideal world, but they never are. So you're constantly being shown this garbage and you can't get there.”

People Thinking World Way Humans Fiction Expectations Ideals Human Life Garbage Ideal World

Author:Charlie Kaufman