Quotes about Fiction

“Novels are longer than life.”

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

“Romances I never read like those I have seen.”

“All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”