Us Fiction Quotes

I would not have voluntarily let go, but I was caught off guard by the magnetic force between us. ~ Nicole Gulla

How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking "The Dodge Rebellion"? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with "Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules"? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It's almost a history lesson: I'm starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans' biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It'd be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting. ~ David Foster Wallace

...every harsh word spoken, every such act or even thought doesn't just disappear - it hangs around somewhere in totality and some day it boomerangs to haunt us. ~ Veena Nagpal

I want to be undone by you. I want to be the one to come to pieces in your arms, to forget there is anything in this world but the two of us. ~ Laura Andersen

...and as she stood on the Ashford platform waiting for the small train to come in, she seemed already separated from the people around her. Tomorrow I shall not be among you anymore; not of you but mysteriously still with you, thought Philippa. As Lady Abbess of Brede had said, "People think we renounce the world. We don't. We renounce its ways but we are still very much in it and it is very much in us. ~ Rumer Godden

Politics divide us. Fiction connects. ~ Elif Shafak

Identity politics divides us; fiction connects. One is interested in sweeping generalizations, the other in nuances. One draws boundaries, the other recognizes no frontiers. Identity politics is made of solid bricks; fiction is flowing water. ~ Elif Shafak

Sure, you can break a man. Bend his will, even, but be careful with the ones that break easily. Those are the ones you have to keep a close eye on. Those are the ones that play possum and hide in the shadows. Just waiting for their time to strike! That's when you're most vulnerable. When you're surrounded by friends. ~ Joe Reyes

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on. ~ Neil Gaiman

In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, 'Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?' I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

There is an old saying: In history nothing is true but the names and dates. In fiction everything is true but the names and dates. The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense. ~ Tom Clancy

I need to fight for the preservation of the Earth type planets and its coexistence with worlds after death.-Banyan ~ Carolina Cody Aldaz

She had long ago learned not to refuse when God brought a need to her attention. ~ Robin Lee Hatcher

Luck took me right out of myself - I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising but always responsible, no tricks for tricks' sake; so satisfying, with its shifting and puzzles. So much fiction turns out to be diversion, in spite of fancy claims, and doesn't really look at anything. Well - this does. ~ Alice Munro

There was an enormous revival of pulp fiction that started in the '60s and continued into the '70s, which in large part gave rise to things like 'Star Wars' and 'Indiana Jones,' among others. But I developed an appetite for the original stuff at the time, and that appetite has never really abated. ~ Chris Roberson

I came very close to saying no, and I often wonder how things would have turned out if I had. I'm being honest when I say I truly never wanted to become a murderer. ~ Simon Kernick

There are two kinds of people who sit around all day thinking about killing people ... mystery writers and serial killers. I'm the kind that pays better. ~ Richard Castle

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. ~ Jonathan Franzen

I was not always that way, but perhaps the shadow Earth, where I spent so many years, mellowed me a bit, and maybe my hitch in the dungeons of Amber reminded me somewhat of the quality of human suffering. I do not know. I only know that I could not pass by the hurt I saw on the form of someone much like someone who had once been a friend. ~ Roger Zelazny

I'm so deeply interested in what it feels like to be other people that I get to operate under the illusion when I'm writing fiction that I'm not really revealing that much about myself. But, of course, I am, and I know that I am. And yet there's this sort of membrane that I get to work behind as I write my fiction, and I love it. ~ Elizabeth Strout

I am the Merlin, bane of the Vale, terror of the four lands. I am chaos and shadows, the last of my people. ~ Jennifer Silverwood

The lady in the liquor store sold me a fifth of whiskey and the landlord's name without taking her eyes off the book she was reading. ~ Andrew Cotto

One of the classic settings in fiction, a little world as reassuring as imperial St Petersburg or Victorian London, is suburban Connecticut in the 1950s. If you close your eyes, you can picture autumn leaves drifting down on quiet streets, you can see commuters in fedoras streaming off the platforms of the New Haven Line, you can hear the tinkle of the evening's first pitcher of martinis; and hear the ugly fights then, after midnight; and smell the desperate or despairing sex.
(Introduction to "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit") ~ Jonathan Franzen

I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author." ~ Bret Easton Ellis

I'm trying to decide if I'm having hallucinations and you're really an angel--or witch. Either one, I can't tell yet. ~ Christine Feehan

We've all changed; shaped by circumstances we've been thrust into, molded by the choices we've made. ~ Siobhan Davis

Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there's nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I read mostly historical fiction - lots of stuff set in ancient Rome and ancient Greece. I also liked sci-fi and fantasy: David Gemmell, Raymond E. Feist. It's a nice escape from the world. As much as I do love real-life stories, they can often make you hurt in a way I'd rather not hurt. ~ Henry Cavill

A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development. ~ Thomas M. Disch

It's pretty confusing."
"Good. Be confused. Confusion is where inspiration comes from. ~ Robyn Mundell

In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance. ~ Michael Dirda

You don't think you're a vampire, Sam. That kind of thing you know. ~ Jennifer Loiske

She skidded around a corner, slamming her shoulder into the wall and bouncing off of it without slowing.

Caleb?

Silence. Forty-six meters. A long stretch of hallway. She pushed faster, harder. Twenty meters.

She burst into the room in unison with a deafening crash of metal shearing metal. ~ G.S. Jennsen

She got injun fire in her blood, as I hear tell it, and it seem to me Lucy about ripe to snap a crack in that jumping bean she call a head. ~ Ojo Blacke

I tend to read non-fiction. ~ Gary Oldman

One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as "the process of judging." This may seem problematic to some, since...we connect it with 'judgmental,' often used nowadays as a derogatory word. But the kind of judgment necessary to the good personal essay, or to the memoir, is not that nasty tendency to oversimplify and dismiss other people out of hand but rather the willingness to form and express complex opinions, both positive and negative.

If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand her past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers. Without this attempt to make a judgment, the voice lacks interest, the stories, becalmed in the doldrums of neutrality, become neither fiction nor memoir, and the reader loses respect for the writer who claims the privilege of being the hero in her own story without meeting her responsibility to pursue meaning. Self revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer. ~ Judith Barrington

I could never write about strange kingdoms. I could never do 'Harry Potter' or anything like that. Even when I did science-fiction, I didn't write about foreign planets and distant futures. I certainly never did fantasies about trolls living under bridges. ~ Richard Matheson

When the truth emerges, it can't be ignored. Nor will it wait. ~ Barbara Delinsky

Myths grew from the ancient tradition of passing on knowledge orally, the only means of doing so before writing.
They're narratives of human existence. They helped our ancestors interpret reality, solve problems, and guided social behavior. They structured natural and social information into patterns using symbols, and embedded fact into story form. This increased their impact, making information meaningful and personally involving - not just cold, detached facts. ~ Alan Joshua

When one studies the properties of atoms, one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction. Particles really do have the possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time. ~ Alan Guth