Top Fiction Quotes

What I now ask of you is considered treason

I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.

Fiction Definition

(n.) The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining; as, by a mere fiction of the mind.

(n.) That which is feigned, invented, or imagined; especially, a feigned or invented story, whether oral or written. Hence: A story told in order to deceive; a fabrication; -- opposed to fact, or reality.

(n.) Fictitious literature; comprehensively, all works of imagination; specifically, novels and romances.

(n.) An assumption of a possible thing as a fact, irrespective of the question of its truth.

(n.) Any like assumption made for convenience, as for passing more rapidly over what is not disputed, and arriving at points really at issue.

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many...

But a slow, deeply satisfied smile came over him, and his breath quickened. 'So softly it starts,' he whispered. 'Foolishly clever and with an unsurvivable trust. It just saved your miserable life, th...

God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.Surely, while we live we are not lost.

I was its skin, its movement, its shape, its god, its creator, its destroyer. And you thought Dexter was bad. The Bridgeman arrives soon.

Many writers, good writers who ought to know better, focus so tightly on the structure demanded by a crime story that they lose track of the fact that they are writing a novel. Accusations of both sen...

Writing is the Art, re-writing the craft.

There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't refl...

..now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, o...

Non-fiction is to theory as fiction is to experience.

What comes from the heart will go to the heart

Push away the past, that vessel in which all emotions curdle to regret.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

She puts her hands on either side of my face, and the room falls away. I have never gotten so lost in a kiss before. And then, the space between us explodes. My heart keeps missing beats and my hands...

We make fiction because we are fiction ... It lived us into being and it lives us still.

I would make a HORRIBLE outlaw. I can plan the crime perfectly, but I'd also need to plan the outcomes to make it work.

People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always...

The formula for this brand of historical writing is to put the public on the inside; to let them feel the palpitations of royal and imperial lovers and to overhear their lispings and cooings. It can b...