Fiction Stories Quotes

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories. ~ Kevin J. Anderson

I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system. ~ Gene Wolfe

I have not much faith in women in fiction ... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before. ~ Willa Cather

The problems of the past.
How the problems of the past, uncorrected, inevitably became the problems of the future. ~ Erika Johansen

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

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity. ~ Rebecca West

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work. ~ James Patterson

As a fiction writer, of course, you need to take some leeway with certain aspects of history to make the story work. ~ Joseph Boyden

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ... and it's magic and wonderful and strange. ~ Neil Gaiman

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning. ~ Arundhati Roy

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. ~ Tim O'Brien

The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story. ~ Christine Jennings

Braxton Cosby's stories feel personal and well thought-out. I'm happy to welcome this entertaining writer to the YA science fiction field. I look forward to more of his work! ~ Tananarive Due

Once upon a time I thought I could change stories, make them go the way I wanted, instead of where they actually went. ~ April Genevieve Tucholke

Genres are what holds each story together and help it along, but in no way should it ever be treated as a boundary, especially for a reader. If I've only read science fiction books, I would probably consider myself mad. ~ Lauren Lola

Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference. ~ Chang-rae Lee

If there's a zeppelin, it's alternate history. If there's a rocketship, it's science fiction. If there are swords and/or horses, it's fantasy. A book with swords and horses in it can be turned into science fiction by adding a rocketship to the mix. If a book has a rocketship in it, the only thing that can turn it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail. ~ Debra Doyle

The truth is that good fantasies carefully limit the magic that's possible. In fact, the magic has to be defined, at least in the author's mind, as a whole new set of natural laws that cannot be violated during the course of the story. That is, if at the beginning of the story you have established that your hero can make only three wishes, you better not have him come up with a fourth wish to save his neck right at the end. That's cheating, and your reader will be quite correct to throw your book across the room and carefully avoid anything you ever write in the future. All speculative fiction stories have to create a strange world and introduce the reader to it - but good fantasy must also establish a whole new set of natural laws, explain them right up front, and then faithfully abide by them throughout. ~ Orson Scott Card

In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories . . . your science fiction stories . . . your Westerns . . . your fairy tales. Get it?" "Yes," Roland said. "Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?" "I guess that's close enough," Susannah said. "Does no one eat stew?" Roland asked. ~ Stephen King

Justin Hermann is one of the best new voices in short fiction-deep and entertaining as hell, with many funny lines, unexpected turns of events, and great insights. Wonderful stories: each one is a trip! ~ Josip Novakovich

I am not dangerous. Only the stories are dangerous. Only the fictions we create, especially when they become expectations. ~ David Levithan

Because we're watching so many movies and are consumed by so many stories, science fiction lets you do something a bit fresh and that hasn't been seen before. ~ Brit Marling

Quantum fiction is any story that witnesses life and the human experience on a subatomic level. ~ Vanna Bonta

The most outrageous tale you can tell is somebody's truth. ~ Marty Rubin

It does sound like a science fiction story and I may sound like one of these guys who walks up and down with a sandwich board saying the end of the world is nigh, but the end is nigh ... ~ Lembit Opik

It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise you've never looked at it, not looked at it. ~ Neil Gaiman

They weren't true stories; they were better than that. ~ Alice Hoffman

Fantasy/science-fiction stories have been around almost as long as each genre, but every hybrid now lives in the shadow of 'Star Wars.' ~ Brian K. Vaughan

I am someone who values knowledge, actual knowledge. I also value stories and fiction a whole lot, and that's where the fake knowledge comes in. ~ John Hodgman

In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution. ~ Josh Trank

The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now. ~ John Crowley

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter. ~ Nicholas Royle

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories. ~ Walker Percy

I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want. ~ Vivian Gornick

It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing. ~ Jacqueline Winspear

Path is only a name for a place where you find yourself. Where you're going on it is only a story. Where you've been on it is only another. Some of the stories are pleasant ones; some are not. That's dark and light. ~ John Crowley

In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is ~ Nancy Kress

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others. ~ Geoff Ryman

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming? ... ~ Eudora Welty

I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the 'Village Voice' and asked me to turn it into an essay. ~ Sloane Crosley

While the stories are fiction, the journey is real. ~ C.J. Peterson

Better to have a small role in God's story than to cast yourself as the lead in your own fiction. ~ LeCrae

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters. ~ Umberto Eco

Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there.
It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds. ~ Neil Gaiman

In crime fiction, I just don't write the parts that aren't a thriller and it's exactly the same in my TV reporting - I distill the essence of the story until it's only the jewels of the tale - and leave in only the most compelling and exciting parts. ~ Hank Phillippi Ryan

But then, that's the beauty of writing stories - each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003] ~ T.C. Boyle

A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem. ~ Ray Bradbury

The 'tail' of a comet, by the way, is a train of dust, but it is not streaming out behind the head of the comet as we might think. Instead, it is 'blown' by a stream of particles coming from the sun, which we call the solar wind. So the tail of the comet always points away from the sun, no matter which way the comet is travelling. There's an exciting proposal, once confined to science fiction stories but now being implemented by Japanese space engineers, to use the solar wind to propel spacecraft equipped with gigantic 'sails'. Like sailing yachts on the sea using real wind, solar wind space-yachts would theoretically provide a very economical way to travel to distant worlds. ~ Richard Dawkins

I don't pay much attention to the distinction between fantasy and science fiction–or between "genre" and "mainstream" for that matter. For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors-which is the logic of narratives in general–over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves–they're the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency "the narrative fallacy" doesn't mean it doesn't also touch upon some aspect of the truth.

Some stories simply literalize their metaphors a bit more explicitly. ~ Ken Liu

I didn't want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it's rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact. ~ Jeanette Winterson

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness ... The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it. ~ Philip Pullman

There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point. ~ Peter David

I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all. ~ Alan Moore

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask. ~ Edwidge Danticat

The biggest problem in the fictional treatment of sex is that it's not treated as part of the story but as a pause from the story. The best sex scenes in fiction are the ones that advance the story. ~ K.M. Soehnlein

Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

It only took Alexis a day to read a five-hundred page book. Fiction stories took her to another world where she could lose herself for a while in someone else's life.
Its funny how things like loans to pay back, a broken home and family, and a future to worry about meant nothing to characters who only had to worry about things like boys, beaches and fun. ~ Lindsay Chamberlin

I love really exploring ... you know, a cop drama for example is a great way to explore class in this country and explore, you know, really, identity in the country and who we are in a way that is extremely exciting, but it's also real, you know, it's also real people and real drama. The same with the military. I mean, a good science fiction story is also great. ~ Ethan Hawke

'Who are we?' And to me that's the essential question that's always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are - at their very best - evocations of that question. When we look up at the night sky and wonder, 'Is there anyone else out there?' we're also asking who we are we in relation to them. ~ David Gerrold

I feel like science fiction can get a bad rap sometimes because people make something just to throw an alien in it or just to make it weird, and it doesn't really have a story. ~ Drew Roy

If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock. ~ Charlie Jane Anders

The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime. ~ Larry Niven

Everyone's got a different story. ~ Emma Donoghue

That was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened - the stories on my mind weren't that funny. ~ John Green

My crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest. ~ Mary Roberts Rinehart

The first time you see the film it takes you right back to those times and those moments. It's very difficult to be objective about the work because you really have to remove yourself and see it a couple of times before you can really involve yourself in the story. ~ Djimon Hounsou

I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other. ~ Jojo Moyes

One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but has been taught not to trust an individual speaker. ~ Ken Liu

The number 1 thing that I don't want to see in a story is when characters exist simply to be proven wrong. ~ Brandon Sanderson

I just told them that dear Uncle Silas has gone away on a long journey," she said. "They're such mites, you know, and I've never let them hear about Death, or have ugly toys or stories about ogres and things. I mean, I do frightfully believe in keeping their little minds free from everything but happy, beautiful things, don't you? ~ Georgette Heyer

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you. ~ Haruki Murakami

A story can tell the truth...but a story can also lie. Stories can bend and twist and obfuscate. Controlling stories is power indeed. And who could benefit most from such a power? ~ Kelly Barnhill

We'd become Japs, Jews, Niggers. We weren't before. ~ H.M. Naqvi

The emptiness, the way his heels rang on the asphalt,was satisfying, emphasised his aloneness. A man alone, alone late at night with no one to say he should be home in bed. ~ Dan Davin

My traveller friends and I came home to roost about midnight and before turning into sleep had coffee in the lounge ... There was a group of Iranian refugees squatting on the floor not far from us, and I could see that one of them was eavesdropping on our conversation. Presently he came over.

'You talk ghosts,' he said, 'Please may we come and listen to your talk? ~ J. Aelwyn Roberts

We're like an alarm clock and the rest of the world is sleeping. - Brandy Wine from GUT-CHECK GREEN. ~ Peter Prasad

We are defined by the stories we tell ourselves. ~ Tony Robbins

Question your thoughts.
Question your stories.
Question your assumptions.
Question your opinions.
Question your conclusions.
Question them all into utter emptiness, stillness and joy.
The keys to freedom are in your hands.
Use them. ~ Adyashanti

Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer ) ~ Italo Calvino

C.J. had once believed that he understood who he was, what he was about, what he was capable of. But when the moment came to act upon these convictions, he discovered that his knowledge of self was faulty. Had his lack of killer instinct been a momentary lapse, first time jitters? Or was there more to it than that? If not the fearless, remorseless man he supposed himself to be, then just who was he? ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

You know, children, quilts, like stories, are part of our heritage, part of our culture. Some quilts even tell stories. Our past is a patchwork of memories and tales. You all keep that forever tucked in your pockets, you hear? ~ Sharon M. Draper

I fell asleep that night in the arms of a killer. I'd never slept better. ~ T.M. Frazier

We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories. ~ Roger C. Shank

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also. ~ John Updike

Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author ... ~ Hannah Arendt

A few told snippets of her stories or described the healing touch of her hand, but none knew anything about the girl herself. How amazing, how humble, was this girl who broke herself into a million pieces and distributed them to anyone who had need. ~ Joanna Davidson Politano

The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don't talk anymore, they don't sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories. ~ Paulo Coelho

For me a film is at its best when you can start filling in the story with your own life experience. ~ Brad Pitt

Power is what men seek and any group that gets it will abuse it. ~ Lincoln Steffens

Why should Americans care about the Nazi back story in World War II? If you don't have the Nazi back story in World War II, World War II is simply not comprehensible. ~ Peter Bergen

The films that I loved growing up were the science fiction films from the late seventies and early eighties [films], which were more about the people and how they are affected by the environments that they are in. Whether they are sort of futuristic or alien of whatever they are; that was the science fiction that I loved. So that is what we tried to make, the sort of film that felt like those old films. ~ Duncan Jones

It was as if hell itself had taken human form and come up from the abyss. ~ Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin, The Walk - Memoir Of A Liberian Civil War Survivor, 2016

Science fiction inspires scientists, but it doesn't exist to dictate what our future should look like. Great science fiction is fun to read and it makes you think, period. Claiming anything more than that is dicey. Grand visions of the future were more prevalent in the golden-age science fiction, but all fiction is a reflection of the current times. As science moves more quickly, the horizon of science fiction tends to recede closer to the present. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

Perhaps our suffering is part of our humanity. ~ Christina L. Barr

Because here's the thing about a book: when you pick up a story, you put down your own ~ Holly Smale

My stories may seem to be the stories of men, but a check of my books will show that I have probably written the stories of more strong women than any other writer ... [examples include] Miss Nesselrode of The Lonesome Gods, Ruth Macken of Bendigo Shafter, Echo Sackett of Ride the River, Em Talon of Ride the Dark Trail are some ... [and] one of my favorites is Miss Jessica Trescott of Matagorda. (The Sackett Companion) ~ Louis L'Amour

If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you. ~ Orson Scott Card

Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story.
("Introduction") ~ Francis M. Nevins Jr.