There’s always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won’t reflect the storyteller’s true beliefs, it...

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

The best fiction is true.

I recalled something I’d read a long time ago about Satan. When he appeared, it wouldn’t be as a demon but as an ordinary-looking guy with a convincing message of peace.

I gave you the best of me.

What they teach you as history is mythology, and true mythology is far from fantasy – every kind reveals true fragments of our real history. A bulk of our real history can be found in...

Stalin mi aveva portato via la casa e mio padre e ora si era preso anche il mio compleanno.

Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever....

Quinn froze. There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made–and he had to make a choice–would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him...

You, my reader, who see me close, wonder about my heartbeats and measure my words, you my close friend who know my eyes and the home of their prose, you, my only lover, who always...

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with...

At the time I was writing it, it started as my own memoirs but transformed into a piece of fiction. All the emotions are mine, the setting is mine, the house is mine. But the...

Fix me,” I commanded him. “This thing, what I’ve done- there’s something wrong with me, Noah. Fix it.”Noah’s expression broke my heart as he brushed my hair from my face and skimmed the line of...

Lust fades after climax, love lasts until breakfast!

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I’ve always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

If I were a character in one of my books, I’d be the optimistic one, believing the best and urging others to do the same.

Just because I wasn’t human, didn’t mean I could discount human life. (Eric)

Ridley nodded. ‘She told me I couldn’t ever tell General Harding or anybody else. Told me I wouldn’t be safe.’ ‘Safe?’ Uncle Bob stopped rocking and took the pipe from between his teeth. ‘She started...

A writer looks at an issue and asks, ‘What if this were to occur? Or what if that was thrown into the mix? What would that look like?

I’ve been down by the stream collecting berries. Would you care for some?”I would, actually, but I don’t want to relent too soon. I do walk over and look at them. I’ve never seen this...

There is no truth, only science and fiction.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

It’s 1am, I have fiction to write!

Have a smile on your face for everyone you meet, and a plan to kill them.

I read nonfiction.”She reared back as if offended.

Every song I write, even if it’s fiction, I have to draw from something in my life to connect it with before it rings true, … Early on in my career, I had points where...

Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation–who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him–but he must go on writing, reflecting...

I have read that long ago there was a land of glass castles that sank beneath the sea. It was not called Atlantis, but Lyonesse. This happened before history and across the ocean, but when...

There’s no other possible explanation!” -Alex Bailey, The Land of Stories; The Wishing Spell

I had evolved a year too soon, and it nearly broke me

Do not mess with this man’s threads!

Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa...

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to...

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the ‘message,’ even if I am not even aware that there is one, is...

is present the truth as fiction.

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

We can’t change the world by shouting, but our words can have meaning if we give them enough respect.

Fiction—good fiction, anyway—is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality’s...

May was the best person I ever knew…. She understood people and she let them be whatever way they needed to be. She had faith in every single person she ever met, and this never...

There wasn’t a shed of doubt in her mind that he’d fulfill her every sexual fantasy and them some.But was a brief, hot affair worth losing his friendship?

Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, and deafened everyone in Porthaven, and scared Calcifer to a cinder, and broke a few hundred hearts. Why should that annoy me?

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...

Everything was quiet now. It was even too freaky quiet. The house seemed big without anyone else inside. It felt lonely; like a ghost town.

Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird.

Everyone asks me how I got started into writing. I wish I had some cool story to tell, but the truth is pretty lame. My wife and I were having a drink on our back...

I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.

The marks we leave are too often scars.

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world “postmodernist.

Beneath Albright’s office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the...

But Mother, I don’t want to go. It’s just that…I have to. I can’t spend the rest of my life hiding in the attic.[…]I don’t want to be a burden[…]I want to do something with...