Famous Quotes About Fiction By Reference

-43 Items- A great collection of quotes about Fiction. Quotations are arranged alphabetically and can be sorted by any header. This list of Fiction sayings and quotes includes the sources and authors of the Fiction quotes when possible. We hope you find this list of quotations about the topic Fiction useful as a reference list or informative as you surf the web, and you can find many other lists of quotes about subjects on Ranker. You can use the items in this fact-based list to create a new list, re-rank it to fit your opinion, then share it with your Twitter followers, Facebook friends or with any other social networks you use on a regular basis.

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Order Name Author Subjects

1

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Milan Kundera

Fiction
2

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Fiction
3

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Milan Kundera

Fiction
4

Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. And what are you reading, Miss -- -? Oh! it is only a novel! replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

Jane Austen

Fiction
5

But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric -- and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron

Fiction
6

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

Wallace Stevens

Fiction
7

Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of ideals, of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax.

Lionel Trilling

Fiction
8

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Virginia Woolf

Fiction
9

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.

Jean Baudrillard

Fiction
10

For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

W. Somerset Maugham

Fiction
11

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

George Eliot

Fiction
12

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

Gore Vidal

Fiction
13

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

Don DeLillo

Fiction
14

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

Anthony Burgess

Fiction
15

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Aldous Huxley

Fiction
16

Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Anthony Burgess

Fiction
17

Novels are longer than life.

Natalie Clifford Barney

Fiction
18

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

Italo Calvino

Fiction
19

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

Virginia Woolf

Fiction
20

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

Oscar Wilde

Fiction
21

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

Robert Browning

Fiction
22

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Mark Twain

Fiction
23

Romances I never read like those I have seen.

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron

Fiction
24

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

Salman Rushdie

Fiction
25

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

E. M. Forster

Fiction
26

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Oscar Wilde

Fiction
27

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

Salman Rushdie

Fiction
28

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

Henry James

Fiction
29

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

Fiction
30

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

André Maurois

Fiction
31

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

Henry James

Fiction
32

The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Fiction
33

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

Simone Weil

Fiction
34

Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.

Philip Roth

Fiction
35

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

J. G. Ballard

Fiction
36

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?

Joseph Conrad

Fiction
37

When I heard the word stream uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.

James Joyce

Fiction
38

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Luigi Pirandello

Fiction
39

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway

Fiction
40

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives -- one is so very small -- but that is the satisfaction of writing -- one can impersonate so many people.

Katherine Mansfield

Fiction
41

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

Gore Vidal

Fiction
42

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence -- a lot passes you by -- simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Anita Brookner

Fiction
43

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

Ernest Hemingway

Fiction

Showing items 1 - 25 of 43

Famous Quotes About Fiction you can use this list to help make your own ranked list about this topic

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric -- and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Novels are longer than life.

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Romances I never read like those I have seen.

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.

Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives -- one is so very small -- but that is the satisfaction of writing -- one can impersonate so many people.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence -- a lot passes you by -- simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.