Great Fiction Quotes

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good. ~ David Foster Wallace

Why did i so passionately require the truth? because all great fiction is true ~ Kinky Friedman

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. ~ Frederic Bastiat

So much of what we read nowadays is there one moment and gone the next. When you read something good, cherish it. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Feelings, too, are facts. Emotion is a fact. Human experience is a fact. It is often possible to gain more real insight into human beings and their motivation by reading great fiction than by personal acquaintance. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Perhaps great fiction is in reality, deep hidden truths. ~ S.G. Savage

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth? ~ Jess Walter

Great fiction is real ~ Kevin Focke

When she was chair of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010, Daisy Goodwin wrote a controversial essay lamenting the 'unrelenting grimness' of so many novels and pointing out that 'generally great fiction contains light and shade'
not only misery but joy and humor. 'It is time for publishers to stop treating literary fiction as the novelistic equivalent of cod-liver oil: if it's nasty it must be good for you. ~ Daisy Goodwin

It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life. ~ F.R. Leavis

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Lying for lying's sake is the inspiration behind all great fiction. ~ Marty Rubin

In my classes, we read great fiction obsessively, and then attempt to see how a writer managed to affect us. We try to understand which elements - diction, syntax, point of view and so forth - made us feel that way. After we spend several weeks reading this way, wondering how the author made us shiver like that, we try our own hand. I ask students to begin with 'green lines,' to isolate writing so good it makes one writer envious of another. Which parts do they wish they had written themselves? Students start to understand how their own writing works, where it ripples with energy… What they really want is to have some kind of firsthand, visceral relationship with a book - to see what it's like to take a work apart and put it back together - using great stories as structural models, just the way the kids I grew up with in Detroit fell in love with cars by spending weekends trying to make derelict Ford Mustangs run again. When the engine finally starts, when you figure out how to make it fire, it's an incredibly powerful learning experience. ~ Dean Bakopoulos

I write science fiction for people who don't read a great deal of science fiction. ~ Bob Shaw

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way. ~ Karen Russell

Jon Land writes great fiction, and Betrayal reads like the best of it. The fact that it's true makes the story all the more riveting ... A sobering indictment of our law enforcement system and one man's relentless quest to see justice done. ~ Robert Leuci

Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination. ~ Charles Colson

If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never will, of course. Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we're all addicted and we can't break the habit now. There's not even anything very twentieth century about it, except the disposition. You just can't kick it, that junk, even if you want to. You can't get the money monkey off your back. ~ Martin Amis

Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me -- Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to "see" others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, or imposing our visions and desires on others. ~ Azar Nafisi

There are elements of truth in all great fiction ~ Teresa Medeiros

I had a great life even before 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' took off. I really enjoy teaching. ~ Kim Edwards

The clichés are, of course, disguised; essentially, they are the same throughout all cheap reading matter, whether it spans the universe or the living room. They are like those 'assorted' cookies that differ from one another only in shape and shade. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

When I did 'Battlestar Galactica' it was the first time I really understood science fiction. That was a very political drama, but set in spaceships so people didn't really take it seriously. But some really fascinating things were explored in that. ~ Michelle Forbes

I remember I had lunch with John Travolta when he was in the doldrums. I mean, he was, as they say, box office poison. He said to me something so great. He said, "I wasn't that good, and I'm not this bad. ~ Rob Reiner

I have a question for you. When you were a little boy, is this the man you dreamed of becoming? ~ Michael LaRocca

The essence of love lies not in communion, but in the fact that each partner forces the other to become something, something infinitely great, the extreme limit of his strength. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

In estimating what amount of power would be requisite to secure the objects of government, we must take into the reckoning, what would be necessary to defend the community against external, as well as internal dangers. Government must be able to repel assaults from abroad, as well as to repress violence and disorders within. It must not be overlooked, that the human race is not comprehended in a single society or community. The limited reason and faculties of man, the great diversity of language, customs, pursuits, situation and complexion, and the difficulty of intercourse, with various other causes, have, by their operation, formed a great many separate communities, acting independently of each other. Between these there is the same tendency to conflict - and from the same constitution of our nature - as between men individually; and even stronger - because the sympathetic or social feelings are not so strong between different communities, as between individuals of the same community. ~ John C. Calhoun

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two. ~ Sara Sheridan

Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant's relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearning of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation-hall. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Scream was great for what it was. For a horror film, it was intelligent, it was funny, it took a laugh at itself. ~ Neve Campbell

Anytime you've got an opportunity to play for your country and win a gold medal, I think that takes it all. That's the greatest thing you could ever achieve in your sport. So, I have been very fortunate to play on great teams, but the gold medal was probably the best. ~ Larry Bird

Men are boys for such a long time and really don't start getting the great roles until they're in their mid-thirties. But then they've got a long time to do them, whereas for women, it's all about playing younger and younger and younger. ~ Cate Blanchett

Having a syndicated comic strip is a great platform for ripping on expressions you hate. ~ Stephan Pastis

What's right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity - intellect and resources - to do some thing about them. ~ Henry Ford II

As he began to drift again Jean was never sure whether he saw or did not see, a troupe of monkeys clad in blue Hussar coats piped with yellow twist, enter from a small door to swing across the great chamber and exit like nomadic wanderers into a great door emblazoned by the setting sun. ~ Craig Herbertson

Derek Jeter has been a great representative of what the Yankees have stood for over the years. He has been a team player who has only cared about winning. He has also been a fine example both on and off the field over his long tenure as a Yankee. It has been a real pleasure to manage him and play alongside him. ~ Joe Girardi

After listening to the great farmer-poet Wendell Berry deliver a lecture on how we each have a duty to love our 'homeplace' more than any other, I asked him if he had any advice for rootless people like me and my friends, who disappear into our screens and always seem to be shopping for the perfect community where we should put down our roots. 'Stop somewhere,' he replied. 'And begin the thousand-year-long process of knowing that place. That's good advice on lots of levels, because in order to win this fight of our lives, we all need a place to stand. ~ Naomi Klein

Every Great Story deserves a Great Ending and
'The Dark Knight Rises' is our Attempt to give that GREAT story, a GREAT ENDING. ~ Christopher Nolan

It helps immerse yourself in what you potentially want to do. Being involved, learning firsthand and observing the craft and absorbing all you can, makes it easier to define what you want. It will also ultimately make you a better Chef. Culinary school, or even a single class, is a great bet too. ~ Giada De Laurentiis

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers. ~ Walter Lippmann

The folly of men has enhanced the value of gold and silver because of their scarcity; whereas, on the contrary, it is their opinion that Nature, as an indulgent parent, has freely given us all the best things in great abundance, such as water and earth, but has laid up and hid from us the things that are vain and useless. ~ Thomas More

There are great truths at the foundation of Freemasonry, truths which it is its mission to teach and which is constituting the very essence of, that sublime system which gives the venerable institution its peculiar identity as a science of morality, and it behooves every disciple diligently to ponder and inwardly digest. ~ Albert Pike

A Culture of Discipline. All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don't need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. Technology ~ James C. Collins

Most people's lives were stories with mysterious endings. Mine was a story with a beginning I could never make sense of. It was like fifty different unrelated strands I couldn't weave into a solid crystal. ~ Lindsay A. Franklin

I hadn't seen my dad get violent since the Great Spatula Incident, and I wasn't anxious to see a repeat of that. ~ Rick Riordan

I can't ask for every movie I make to be great and brilliant. I can only try. ~ Kristy Swanson

I could faintly smell the ocean. I imagined being one of the old oak trees standing there swaying in the wind and braving all sorts of weather. I pondered what they had seen in the past and what they might see in the future ~ Nancy B. Brewer

I think changing the Democratic Party platform [at the convention] is a great place to start. It should include expanding Social Security, a $15 minimum wage, and breaking up too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street - among other Sanders priorities. ~ Ben Wikler

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good ... It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation. ~ David Halberstam

Cold November nights. It feels as if summer never happened. The beauty of setting sun, moon, and stars. Sailing to nowhere, but finding happiness in our togetherness. Never forget what we are. Stranded hearts." Fidelis O. Mkparu (2016), author of 'Love's Affliction' (and soon to be published 'Tears before Exaltation') ~ Fidelis O. Mkparu

I'm sure mothers are important across every culture, but particularly in Korean society, the role of the mother is of great importance. ~ Bong Joon-ho

America is a great country. It has many shortcomings, many social inequalities, and it's tragic that the problem of the blacks wasn't solved fifty or even a hundred years ago, but it's still a great country, a country full of opportunities, of freedom! Does it seem nothing to you to be able to say what you like, even against the government, the Establishment? ~ Golda Meir

Certainly the death of Christ has been understood as expiation for human sin through the whole length of church history, and I defer with all possible sincerity to the central tenets of the Christian tradition, but as for myself, I confess that I struggle to understand the phenomenon of ritual sacrifice, and the Crucifixion when explicated in its terms. The concept is so central to the tradition that I have no desire to take issue with it, and so difficult for me that I leave it for others to interpret. If it answered to a deep human need at other times, and it answers now to other spirits than mine, then it is a great kindness of God toward them, and a great proof of God's attentive grace toward his creatures. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45. ~ Robert Gottlieb

I've just always been around great songwriters. To me, they were the standard. ~ Leon Bridges

If we do not use great care to mortify our will, there are many things which can deprives us of the holy freedom of spirit that we are seeking in order to fly more freely to our Creator, without always being bogged down with the clay of this earth. Moreover, there can never be solid virtue in a soul that is attached to its own will. ~ Teresa Of Avila

Thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy. ~ Jack Kerouac

Tantric scholars and Kundalini gurus often draw a distinction between the chakras as witnessed through Kundalini experiences and the Westernized model of the chakras as a "personal growth system." Some claim that this distinction is so great that there is no meaningful relationship between the two...yet I do not see these experiences as unrelated, but existing on a continuum.

I firmly believe that clearing the chakras through understanding their nature, practicing related exercises and using visualization and meditation, prepares the way for a spiritual opening that is apt to be less tumultuous than is so often the case for Kundalini awakenings. I believe this Westernization is an important step for speaking to the Western mind in a way that is harmonious with the circumstances in which we live, rather than antithetical to it. It gives us a context in which these experiences can occur.

Likewise, there are many who say that the chakras, as vortices in the subtle body, have nothing whatsoever to do with the physical body or the central nerve ganglia emanating from teh spinal column, and that a spiritual awakening is not a somatic experience. Because an experience is not *entirely* somatic does not mean that its somatic aspect is negated.... I believe this view is just more evidence of the divorce between spirit and body that I find to be the primary illusion from which we must awaken. ~ Anodea Judith

A leader is not an administrator who loves to run others, but someone who carries water for his people so that they can get on with their jobs. ~ Robert Townsend

The Church in contemporary America does not need more strategies, steps, or keys to the Christian life. The Church needs truth, and more specifically, the great foundational truths of historical Christianity. ~ Charles Leiter

As long as I'm working, I'm happy. You see my face - great. You don't see my face - too bad, I don't care. I'll keep going. ~ John DiMaggio

Great big bugger,' said Aziraphale. 'Sleepeth beneath the thunders of the upper deep. Under loads of huge and unnumbered polypol - polipo - bloody great seaweeds, you know. Supposed to rise to the surface right at the end, when the sea boils. ~ Terry Pratchett

The great thing about having digital comics is that it is like having a comic-book shop on your digital device. It has turned comics from a destination buy to an impulse buy. ~ Jim Lee

By his own assessment, he was no genius. He had "no great quickness of apprehension or wit" or "power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought." On the many occasions when I share those feelings, I find it encouraging to review those words because that Englishman did okay for himself - his name was Charles Darwin. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

To work for salary is to mortgage your life. ~ Sunday Adelaja

I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it's the fiction writer's job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in. ~ Wells Tower

It's a great feeling to connect with someone as charming as you. ~ Avijeet Das

Great ideas often have no reference points.
We have nothing to compare them to. They are original, and awkward. And so they are the most vulnerable to people trying to kill them. They do not conform to what exists, so they challenge us. ~ David Hieatt

Where is this great love for rock and roll that existed for 50 or 60 years? ~ Billy Corgan