Home / Topics / Fiction Quotes

Fiction Quotes

Browse 6707 quotes about Fiction.

Fiction Quotes

“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

“There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.”

Men Eye Law Values Fiction Equal Benefits Humorous Constant Every Man Operations Pleasant Pockets Smallest Furniture

Book:The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby

Source: The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby

“When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.”

Writing Trying Kind Doe I Can Reason Values Interest Natural My Own Fiction Drama Weakness Mediums Endowment Slender Confessing Natural Phenomena

Author:H. P. Lovecraft

“It's not fiction's job to be photographically representative of reality. If I want to make a fictional world where there's no kindness, this doesn't mean I believe there's no kindness in the real world. In fact, what it may mean is that I very much value kindness. Like if you make a painting in which only greens are allowed, it wouldn't mean you don't believe in blue.”

Ifs World Want Believe May Mean Real Facts Reality Jobs Values I Believe Fiction Kindness Painting Blue Don't Believe Real World Representatives Fictional Worlds

Author:George Saunders

“Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while Im walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.”

Ifs Feels Real Character Values Fiction Worry Week Development Reader Walking Perfection Stores Manage Groceries Character Development Aisle Grocery Stores

Author:J. Courtney Sullivan

“I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.”

People Knows Believe Book Values Reading Literature Lost Fiction Particular Reader Habit Entertainment Enjoyed Sentimental Frivolous Sentimental Value

Author:David Nicholls

“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”

“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.”

“I am someone who values knowledge, actual knowledge. I also value stories and fiction a whole lot, and that's where the fake knowledge comes in.”

Whole Stories Values Fiction Fake

Author:John Hodgman

“I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.”

Thinking World Moments Values Fiction Knowing Fragments Enabling

Author:Ben Lerner

“All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.”

Mean Values Fiction Values In Society

Author:Martin Amis

“"Hard" science fiction probes alternative possible futures by means of reasoned extrapolations in much the same way that good historical fiction reconstructs the probable past. Even far-out fantasy can present a significant test of human values exposed to a new environment. Deriving its most cogent ideas from the tension between permanence and change, science fiction combines the diversions of novelty with its pertinent kind of realism.”

“We translated the script together with them. And during the process of translation, they rewrote the scripts. They put a lot into it. They made it their own. There are names of plants or chants or certain rites and everything that you cannot come across it in a movie. You know, you cannot learn about them casually. So the film doesn't have value in the ethnographical, anthropological. It's fiction.”

Knows Made Together Film Certain Values Names Process Fiction Plant Scripts Made It Translations Rite

Author:Ciro Guerra

“I think that is one of the things that is beautiful about fiction and that you can do through drama. If I was a detective, I could make a certain version of everything we know to be exactly true. And that would have a certain kind of truth value. And there are certain other things that we know that are emotionally true.”

Ifs Thinking Knows Kind Beautiful Certain Values Can Do Fiction Drama Versions Detectives

Author:Liza Johnson

“I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process.”

Humans Values Process Fiction Intelligent Senses Scales Data Fiction Writers Revision

Author:George Saunders