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Fiction Quotes

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Fiction Quotes

“I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I'm picking up is what's in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.”

Years Two Lasts Reading Fiction Stores Sunday Last Year Days Off Love To Read

Author:Karen Thompson Walker

“Until recently we’ve only been able to speculate about story's persuasive effects. But over the last several decades psychology has begun a serious study of how story affects the human mind. Results repeatedly show that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.”

Writing Mind Humans Facts Stories Shows Seems Able Lasts Values Belief Results Attitude Fiction Study Psychology Effects Serious Evidence Argument Decades Human Mind Persuasive

Author:Jonathan Gottschall

“A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.”

Want Has Beens Two Lasts Given My Own Fiction Careers Influence Science Fiction Lists Labels Genre Prize Mainstream Dissidents Cyberpunk Manifestos

Author:William Gibson

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

Source: The foundation trilogy: three classics of science fiction

“I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.”

Book Done Wanted Lasts Born Simple Fiction Solutions Complicated Absurd Recognition Nonsense Toms Sawyer Simple Solutions

Author:Robertson Davies

“Most of what I want to try to do is continue to go places with fiction that I've never gone before, and tell stories I've never told before, and one of the problems you rapidly discover about fans is what fans want is the last thing they liked. They want more of that.”

Want Trying Stories Problem Lasts Fiction Gone Fans

Author:Neil Gaiman

“Theres two tiers of science fiction: the McDonalds sci-fi like Star Trek, where they have an adventure and solve it before the last commercial, and there are books that once youve read, you never look at the world the same way again.”

World Way Looks Two Book Lasts Stars Fiction Adventure Science Fiction Solve Sci Fi Mcdonalds

Author:David Gerrold

“They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me that these are a fiction from first to last. O Reason, thou (alone) speakest the truth. Then perish the fools who forged the (religious) traditions or interpreted them!”

Firsts Book Reason Facts Lasts Religious Fiction Fool Tradition Sacred Forged Religious Traditions

Author:Al-Maʿarri

“The Heretic Queen is historical fiction at its best. Michelle Moran seamlessly incorporates accurate details into a story full of suspense, intrigue, and tenderness that's impossible to put down until you've reached the last page. An absolute triumph!”

Stories Lasts Fiction Impossible Pages Absolutes Historical Details Triumph Suspense Queens Historical Fiction Accurate Tenderness Intrigue Heretic

Author:Tasha Alexander

“The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been.”

Ifs Has Beens Ends Stories Lasts Death Time Fiction Spinning Bowels

Book:Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings

Source: Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings

“Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story.”

Way Mind Stories Lasts Goal Fiction Reader Last Words

Author:Jeff VanderMeer

“A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.”

Firsts May Lasts Fiction Steps Development Pages Glory Add Finals Artistic Evident Every Step

Book:The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)

Source: The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)

“My first and last love will always be fiction. It's the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night. I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.”

Knows Firsts Lasts Night Fall Fiction Morning Novel Affair Keep Going Love Affair Firsts And Lasts

Author:Daniel Alarcon

“Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.”

Writing Years Two Lasts Three Imagination Fiction Prose Three Years Writing Fiction

Author:Bret Easton Ellis

“Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.”

Way Giving Lasts Fiction Accounts Nails Stop Time

Author:Rebecca West

“That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I'm better off just making things up.”

I Can Lasts Remember Fiction Happened Week Husband My Husband Better Off Because I Can Fiction Writers

Author:Bonnie Jo Campbell

“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 big thing is it's a domestic drama. Everything else in science fiction tends to be high-concept. Really for the last 40 years or so I think sci-fi's been a little cold and a little inhuman quite often - certainly since the 1980s - and I really wanted to do something that almost felt like a regular, real-life drama but just set it in a sci-fi setting. I think the best stuff is always like that.”

Thinking Years Littles Real Bigs Wanted Lasts Felt Stuff Fiction Cold Drama Concepts Science Fiction Real Life Setting Settings Sci Fi Big Things Inhuman Drama Life

Author:Mark Millar

“We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.”

Thinking Trying Hard Lasts Language Fiction Poet Fiction Writers

Author:Edward Hirsch

“'Breaking Bad.' Because it's the best American narrative fiction of the last ten years.”

Years Lasts Fiction Ten Narrative Best American

Author:David Benioff

“[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon.”

“I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.”

People Way Should Writing Said Seems Lasts Process Fiction Novel Clear Students Mines Degrees Sentences Writing Fiction Proselytizing

Author:John Irving

“Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.”

Wells Made Ideas Facts Lasts Deals Fiction Metaphor Bones Myth Symbols Journalism Prose Scraping

Author:Hilary Mantel