Best subjects & fiction Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.”

Writing Years Firsts Character Stories Would Be Imagination Fiction Novel Subjects Skills Research Useless Articles Reporters My Imagination Profile

Author:Amy Waldman

“[Among the books he chooses, a statesman] ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse.”

Book Philosophy Government Science Interesting Fiction History Written Subjects Ought Accounts Prose Verses Good Book Statesmen Science And Philosophy Interesting Book

Book:Bully!

Source: Bully!

“The strange and wonderful Book of Job treats of the same subject as we are discussing; its contents are a fiction, conceived for the purpose of explaining the different opinions which people hold on Divine Providence. ...This fiction, however, is in so far different from other fictions that it includes profound ideas and great mysteries, removes great doubts, and reveals the most important truths. I will discuss it as fully as possible; and I will also tell you the words of our Sages that suggested to me the explanation of this great poem.”

“Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.”

People World Art Matter Choices Fiction Audience Subjects Thick Subject Matter Retaining Thick Of It

Book:Living by Fiction

Source: Living by Fiction

“We are tired of the pretense that we have special privileges and the reality that we have none; of the fiction that we are queens, and the fact that we are subjects.”

Facts Reality Fiction Feminism Special Subjects Tired Privilege Queens Pretense

Author:Lillie Devereux Blake

“And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.”

Helping Fiction Subjects Theory Make Sense Explanation Adequate

Book:Hopes and impediments: selected essays

Source: Hopes and impediments: selected essays

“I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.”

Thinking Humans Ideas Character Human Beings Fiction Subjects Essays Didactic

Author:David Foster Wallace

“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”

Matter Choices Fiction Subjects Morality Narrative Novelists Plot Subject Matter Bewildered

Book:Outlander

Source: Outlander

“My non-fiction films are pretty much fiction, or at least close... It's all "movies" for me. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.”

Way I Can Film Decision Fiction Subjects Decision Making Invites Non Fiction

Author:Werner Herzog

“I certainly incorporate facts into my fiction. I take the basic facts from the life of my subject and I pick and choose what to use to construct a really interesting novel. I don't let facts get in the way of my imagination and my exploration of the subject's emotions and relationships.”

Way Facts Use Imagination Interesting Emotion Fiction Novel Subjects Picks Exploration Constructs My Imagination Really Interesting

Author:Melanie Benjamin

“That is as true for fiction or non-fiction. The writer has to really know their subject. It is really important to remember that the readers are a lot smarter than the writer. Also, good writing has to do with rewriting. You will never get it right the first time. So you rewrite and rewrite again until you get it right. Until you, and the reader, will be able to visualize what you're writing about.”

Knows Writing Firsts Important Able Remember Fiction Subjects Reader First Time Smarter Non Fiction Good Writing Rewriting

Author:Michael Scott

“I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.”

Thinking Way Looks Book Matter Fiction Gone Subjects Photograph My Way Packages Select Subject Matter

Author:Bret Easton Ellis

“The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.”

Feels Humans Heart Persons Matter Character Goal Fiction Moral Struggle Subjects Tears No Matter What Necks Paradox Being Human Human Heart Fiction Writers

Author:Tim O'Brien

“There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’”

Ifs Way Art Real Fiction Subjects Jokes Recognition Payoff

Author:Robert Stone

“The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?”

Ends Remember Fiction Novel Happened Subjects Plot

Author:Graham Greene

“And for the authentical truth of either person or actions, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? Poor envious souls they are that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions; material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy.”

Want Persons Soul Action Natural Poor Fiction Virtue Subjects Materials Limits Tragedy Contrary Instruction Elegant Limbs Envious Deflection

Book:The Works of George Chapman: Plays

Source: The Works of George Chapman: Plays

“This is probably the single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery that can be understood only with the aid of a helpful imagination.”

Needs Imagination Fiction Mystery Subjects Horror Understood Aids Helpful

Book:Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales

Source: Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales

“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.”

Writing Action Reading Found My Own Fiction Grace Subjects Devil Territory

Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.”

“Through reproductive technology, postmodernist art dispenses with the aura. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence... are undermined.”

Way Giving Art Fiction Technology Subjects Creating Notion Authenticity Originality Frank Quotations Repetition Accumulation Auras

Book:On the Museum's Ruins

Source: On the Museum's Ruins

“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

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