Best fiction & ifs Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 4

“Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction...All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland...I just hate to be in one corner. I hate to be put as only a guitar player, or either only as a songwriter, or only as a tap dancer. I like to move around...Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.”

“I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it's less good than what I do, there's no point in reading it, if it's better than what I do it makes me depressed”

Ifs Reading Fiction Watches Comedy Science Fiction No Point

Author:Douglas Adams

“Sci-fi uses the images that sf - starting with H.G. Wells - made familiar: space travel, aliens, galactic wars and federations, time machines, et cetera, taking them literally, not caring if they are possible or even plausible. It has no interest in or relation to real science or technology. It's fantasy in space suits. Spectacle. Wizards with lasers. Kids with ray guns. I've written both, but I have to say I respect science fiction enough that I wince when people call it sci-fi.”

“Science fiction - and the correct shortcut is 'sf' - uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it's doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors.”

“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.”

“With Rodham, for instance, it has to work on an emotional level. It has to work on a character level. If it's only "Look, it has famous people," then it's a wax museum come to life and that's really boring. It's sort of like what they say about science fiction and horror where the really good ones, if you remove that element of it, it still has to work. That's the reason The Shining works or Rosemary's Baby or Blade Runner.”

People Ifs Looks Stills Reason Character Levels Fiction Emotional Baby Horror Elements Science Fiction Shining Boring Instance Remove Museums Runners Blades Rosemary Blade Runner

Author:James Ponsoldt

“I don't think it's good when entertainment tries to proselytize and I don't think people ultimately want someone showing up in their living room and just hectoring at them all day long. But if you can create a space where people are caught up in something - whether it's a drama, a comedy, a romantic comedy, or science fiction - that's when people give over their minds and allow their emotions to flow.”

People Ifs Thinking Want Giving Trying Mind Long Space Rooms Emotion Fiction Comedy Drama Flow Science Fiction Caught Entertainment Caught Up Living Room Showing Up

Author:John Ridley

“Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. When in doubt, tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.”

Ifs Use Remember Fiction Doubt Truth Is Regard Possession Stranger Valuable Telling The Truth When In Doubt Stranger Than Fiction Valuable Possessions

Author:Mark Twain

“Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.”

Ifs Interesting Fiction Documentaries

Author:Jean-Luc Godard

“It's the fantasy of first love. If you've been married for 400 years, as I have, it's nice to experience first love again and you can vicariously through a book. And it is such a fantasy. It takes you away from doing the dishes and the laundry. I think of this as a contemporary romance rather than erotic fiction.”

Ifs Thinking Years Firsts Book Romance Fiction Fantasy Nice Married Contemporary Dishes First Love Erotic Laundry Love Again

Author:E. L. James

“If I would had been born years earlier, I would have been in all the Westerns. It's just the way that the industry goes. But now, we are in an age of a lot of different kinds of fears, and you have the science fiction and horror genres doing our morality plays the same way that they would have done in Westerns. I absolutely accept it. In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.”

“If you are inclined to leave your character solitary for any considerable length of time, better question yourself. Fiction is association, not withdrawal.”

Ifs Character Fiction Length Association Solitary Withdrawal

Book:The Blue Hen's Chick: An Autobiography

Source: The Blue Hen's Chick: An Autobiography

“By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same surprise... both strike us as if they were simultaneously remembrances and revelations.”

Ifs Moments Fiction Subjects Surprise Photograph Strikes Revelations Compelling Remembrance Fidelity

Author:Tod Papageorge

“Every photo is almost a fiction or a dream. If it's really good, it's another form of life.”

Ifs Dream Form Fiction

Author:Sylvia Plachy

“Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story.”

Ifs Should Persons Ends Facts Stories Three Fiction Situation Changed Elements Things Have Changed

Book:Conversations with Malcolm Cowley

Source: Conversations with Malcolm Cowley

“I realized that for fantasy and science fiction, especially from my youth, white was the default. Luke Skywalker was in the lead, or even if you were a hobbit, you're going to be white. That was an extremely old-fashioned, obviously really narrow-minded way to look at things.”

Ifs Way Looks White Fiction Fantasy Youth Science Fiction I Realized Old Fashioned Default Luke Narrow-minded

Author:Brian K. Vaughan

“Going from memoir to fiction was fantastic. I had been afraid to move away from memoir; I'd written some novel drafts, but they weren't well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that "memoir outsells fiction two to one" (not sure if that's true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate.”

Ifs Wells Two Moments Moving Felt Fiction Novel Written Smart Painful Memoir Agents Fantastic Things To Do Not Sure Mining Painful Moments

Author:Janice Erlbaum

“More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.”

People Ifs Pay Attention Fiction Television Journalism Pay Attention Narrative Prose

Author:David Simon

“You've got the people you know, which are problematic. Always. They're rich but they're also real people living their lives alongside you. Then you've got the people that you make-up completely, who are often missing a dimension if they don't have some reference to real people. So strangers exist in this in-between space, where in not knowing them, you are creating a fiction for them, even in passing, but at the same time, there they are, with their actual bodies and their actual clothes. It's totally enticing.”

People Ifs Knows Real Body Space Fiction Knowing Rich Missing Creating Clothes Stranger Passing Passings Dimensions Not Knowing Enticing

Author:Miranda July

“If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.”

Ifs Want Writing Stories Fiction Paragraph

Author:James Patterson

“There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.”

Ifs Writing Littles Stories Would Be Differences Fiction Boys Novel Dog Killing Monsters Memoir My Dog Eric Doing Me

Author:Paul Auster

“If I had a nickel for every time someone told me apologetically "I don't read fiction," I wouldn't have to write fiction anymore. And I share that fascination with the truth. I'm not looking down my nose at it.”

Ifs Writing Fiction Share Noses Fascination Looking Down Nickels

Author:Ron Currie Jr.

“We sometimes drive ourselves crazy with how our books will be "seen," when in fact we already know what they're about, and where our obsessions are. If we can spin those obsessions into fiction, then there's a decent chance they will be "fiction-worthy," as you call it. The idea of the "sweep of ideas" is a complicated one.”

Ifs Knows Book Ideas Sometimes Facts Chance Fiction Crazy Complicated Worthy Obsession Decent

Author:Meg Wolitzer

“If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.”

Ifs Writing May Persons Eye Black Dark White Race Fiction Talking Color Skins Blue Appearance Etc Not Talking Blue Eyes Black Or White Black Eyes Physical Appearance Dark Skin

Author:Jamaica Kincaid

“So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.”

Ifs Writing Seems Lines Fiction Novel Separation Useless Non Fiction

Author:Jamaica Kincaid

“The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.”

Ifs Writing Literature Fiction Limits Science Fiction

Author:Aleksandar Hemon

“Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander - and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters - but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters' bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts.”

Ifs Kind Real Character Body Fiction Violence Example Fit Scripts Instance Narrative Genre Encounters Minorities Norm Messy Lisbeth Salander

Author:Lidia Yuknavitch

“If Fobbit leaves a reader feeling stranded in some bland in-between territory, then I haven't done my job. But having said all that, I didn't consciously write the book with a particular moral intent. I took what I experienced and processed it through the sausage factory of fiction. It's up to readers to interpret what's on the page - as is the case with any novel.”

Ifs Writing Said Book Done Feelings Jobs Fiction Moral Cases Novel Havens Particular Reader Pages Territory Factories Sausage Bland Stranded

Author:Dave Abrams

“If you talk about genres - I don't care if you're talking about war, Westerns, science fiction, horror, fantasy, humor, romance - anything you can find, strolling the aisles of a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, I can bring you many comic books representing each genre.”

Ifs I Can Book War Care Romance Fiction Talking Fantasy Horror Science Fiction Don't Care Noble Comic Genre I Don't Care Borders Comic Book Representing Strolling Aisle

Author:Michael Uslan

“If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.”

Ifs Writing I Can Can Do Fiction Crafts I Have Learned Great Writers I Can Do It

Author:Elliott Colla

“If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear.”

Ifs Knows Believe Stories Choices Given Fiction Clear Perspective Reader Nonfiction Bias Deliberate

Author:Kathleen Rooney

“There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.”

Ifs Kind Facts Answers Fiction Raises Imperatives

Author:Fred D'Aguiar

“And there are rules for crime fiction. Or if not rules, at least expectations and you have to give the audience what it wants.”

Ifs Want Giving Fiction Audience Crime Expectations Crime Fiction

Author:Tod Goldberg

“They [academy writing programs] have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you're not constantly looking at your education model and adjusting for the change, you'll find yourself teaching antiquity. Like all of these programs that won't accept students who are writing genre fiction - what an institutional ego!”

Ifs World Writing Fiction Accepting Teaching Changed Students Ego Models Concepts Program Genre Finding Yourself Filmmaking Publishing Academy Antiquity Adjusting

Author:Tod Goldberg

“If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.”

Ifs Trying Art Reality Fiction Risk Pure Logic Tales Narrative Fairy Fairy Tale Closest Risk It Changing Reality

Author:Chris Abani

“If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.”

People Ifs Thinking Made Fiction Gossip

Author:John Dufresne

“I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Sometimes Film Courses Stuff Answers Fiction Writing Fiction

Author:Matthew Specktor

“If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock.”

Ifs Writing Stories Fiction Science Fiction Genre Thrown Spaceships Fiction Stories

Author:Charlie Jane Anders

“With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.”

Ifs Character Fiction Privileged Autobiography Main Characters

Author:Kate Zambreno

“If anyone ever said biopic I would say, "It's not a biopic." We're fighting uphill against the weight of history. I was like, why don't we just call it historical fiction?”

Ifs Said Fighting Fiction Weight Historical Historical Fiction

Author:Don Cheadle

“I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.”

Ifs Reading Fiction College Contemporary Witch Twelve Minimalism Ponds Contemporary Fiction Blackbirds

Author:Leni Zumas

“A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation.”

People Ifs Thinking Way Want Wells Kind Sometimes Stories Reading Bits Fiction Broken Short Story Renaissance Broken Up Readership Fragmentation

Author:Lorin Stein

“Regarding fiction, our concern shouldn't be the author's origin (and of course I am forgetting the sales people right here), because that is actually merely a simplified, almost insulting judgment of the book by its cover - or rather by the name and origin of its author - an act of discrimination if we want to say it in a more provoking way, but at the least an act of ignorance and false empathy.”

People Ifs Way Want Book Courses Names Forget Fiction Ignorance Judgment Empathy Concern Discrimination Provoking Insulting Sales People

Author:Sasa Stanisic

“The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there's anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it's that feeling. I always feel that way.”

Ifs Way Feels Feelings Fiction Identity Theme Outsiders

Author:Dan Chaon

“News is almost more interesting to me than other people's fiction, if that makes sense. But other people's fiction in terms of design is still incredibly interesting to me.”

People Ifs Stills Term Interesting Fiction Design News Make Sense

Author:Neill Blomkamp

“I had artists that refused to work on Chappie if they were working on a design that actually said Denel on the side of the thing. But anyway, it's the blurring of fiction and reality that was appealing and I certainly did not want them to be in the movie and not be themselves.”

Ifs Want Said Reality Artist Sides Fiction Design Fiction And Reality

Author:Neill Blomkamp

“Back in the day, a lot of our instructors in nonfiction were actually fiction scholars. So they would bring in stories as models for the essay. And in some ways that's a good idea, because we can all learn from other genres. But I think it also made me realize that I literally didn't have an essay model, and that if I wanted one I would have to find it.”

Ifs Thinking Way Made Ideas Stories Wanted Realizing Fiction Models Genre Good Ideas Nonfiction Scholar Essays Instructors Back In The Day

Author:John D'Agata

“I would ask the people who were generous toward my own work. After class one day a poetry professor said to me, "Hey, there's this guy Basho you would find interesting," and so I found Basho. A fiction teacher told me, "You ought to read Clarice Lispector if you're interested in that sort of in-between stuff," and then Lispector appeared. It's not magic. You just keep your eyes open.”

People Ifs Said Eye Guy Asks Found Stuff My Own Interesting Fiction Class Teacher Magic Ought One Day Hey Generous Professors This Guy

Author:John D'Agata

“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.”

“It's one of those things that if I was smart enough to explain it in words, I wouldn't have had to make a movie "World Of Tomorrow" out of it. It's a love letter to science fiction.”

Ifs World Enough Fiction Tomorrow Smart Letters Science Fiction Love Letter

Author:Don Hertzfeldt

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