QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON FICTION

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992, Russian-born American author)

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992, Russian-born American author)

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!"

Jane Austen (1775-1817, British novelist)

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 (1930-, British author)

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 (1930-, British author)

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of Twentieth Century.

J. G. Ballard (1930-, British author)

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 (French postmodern philosopher, writer)

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 (1914-2004, American historian)

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

Anita Brookner (1938-, British novelist, art historian)

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

Robert Browning (1812-1889, British poet)

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 (1917-1993, British writer, critic)

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 (1917-1993, British writer, critic)

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.

Lord Byron (1788-1824, British poet)

Romances I never read like those I have seen.

Lord Byron (1788-1824, British poet)

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

Italo Calvino (1923-1985, Cuban writer, essayist, journalist)

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 (1857-1924, Polish-born British novelist)

The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.

Robert Coover

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 (1926-, American author)

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982, American science fiction writer)

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Joan Didion (1934-, American essayist)

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

E. L. Doctorow (1931-, American novelist)

In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-, American author, columnist)

In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-, American author, columnist)

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 (1819-1880, British novelist)

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.

Edward M. Forster (1879-1970, British novelist, essayist)

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

Janet Frame (1924-, New Zealand novelist, poet)

By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.

Carlos Fuentes (1928-, Mexican novelist, short-story writer)

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

William Golding (1911-1993, British author)

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

Richard Hughes

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-, American author)

What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-, American author)

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

Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)

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 (1898-1961, American writer)

Where everything is possible miracles become commonplace, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983, American author, philosopher)

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

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963, British author)

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

John Irving (1942-, American author)

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

Henry James (1843-1916, American author)

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

Henry James (1843-1916, American author)

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 (1882-1941, Irish author)

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Stephen King (1947-, American horror writer, actor)

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

Milan Kundera (1929-, Czech author, critic)

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Milan Kundera (1929-, Czech author, critic)

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

Doris Lessing (1919-, British novelist)

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-, Latin American author)

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 (1888-1923, New Zealand-born British author)

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 (1874-1965, British novelist, playwright)

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

Andre Maurois (1885-1967, French writer)

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State's crime when it sets out to crush that individuality.

Ian McEwan (1948-, British author)

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

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977, Russian-born American novelist, poet)

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991, American poet)

Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.

Dudley Nichols (American actor)

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964, American author)

The first sentence of every novel should be: ''Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.'' Meander if you want to get to town.

Michael Ondaatje

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 (1867-1936, Italian author, playwright)

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

Philip Roth (1933-, American novelist)

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 (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)

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 (1948-, Indian-born British author)

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 (1948-, Indian-born British author)

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Susan Sontag (1933-, American essayist)

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 (1879-1955, American poet)

It is to be believed because it is absurd.

Quintus Septimus Tertullianus

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 (1905-1975, American critic)

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 (1925-, American novelist, critic)

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

Gore Vidal (1925-, American novelist, critic)

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-, American novelist)

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 (1910-1943, French philosopher, mystic)

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

Oscar Wilde (1856-1900, British author, wit)

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

Oscar Wilde (1856-1900, British author, wit)

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 (1882-1941, British novelist, essayist)

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 (1882-1941, British novelist, essayist)

 Back to Daimon Library English Quotes Search Page