Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..

What’s more important than recycling? Producing something to recycle.

I just want to domething that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they...

Beautiful untrue things are even more beautiful when they’re true.

What? No way.”With a shrug, he tossed the wig into the water fountain.

I’ve committed to nothing…and that’s just suicide…by tiny, tiny increments.

The more we prepare for war, the more we make it a reality. Yet, it would seem, to prepare for war may also be the best and possibly the only way to avoid it.’ –...

Carefully studying the delicate form of the doll, she was thinking how easy it was to wish for things as a child. Then nothing seemed impossible. Growing up, one realizes how many things one cannot...

The truth, as much as people acted like they wanted to hear it, was sometimes too cruel and harsh.

I don’t like this. I don’t like this. I don’t like this.

Il ne me reste plus qu’un jour à vivre après en avoir volé quinze milliards à la mort. Plus qu’un. Deux au grand maximum.

She’s still quite fit at ninety, fit enough to chew her food with her own teeth. Apparently she grew up in a house without a bar of soap, let alone tooth powder. Her family didn’t...

As a fiction writer I am not always sure where reality ends and non reality begins, when sane thoughts become less than sane, or what is imagination versus undiscovered truth, but ultimately, it is my...

Lewis had said that there is no creativity de novo in us—that we are all sub-creators pirating and rearranging portions of reality. I agreed. But it was only an idea. And then it took on...

They were going to expel me. Mom convinced them not to… and got them to apologize,” Fern said, almost embarrassed.Really?” Eddie said. “See, Sammy, you don’t mess with the Commander, do you?” Eddie playfully hit...

Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.

Not really hungry.””She’ll eat.” Pritkin said curtly.”I said —””If you starve to death it would damage my professional reputation.””I eat plenty.””The same does not apply should I strangle you in understandable irritation, however.””I’ll have a...

The problem with thinking up a new and original idea within a novel is that you have to make sure that Kurt Vonnegut did not already think of it.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.

Never run upstairs when someone’s chasing you. Don’t try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is...

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

Prayer or not, I want to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is possible for anyone to find that one special person. That person to spend Christmas with or grow old with...

She’s dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.

Fiction is only fiction because it is yet to be proven.

For her and Nurul merely to share a meal cooked in their own kitchen was a triumph; to wake up together each morning a luxury.

Smiling, I cut across the quadrangle toward the commons. I felt better about life than I had in a very long time. We could do this, Lissa and me. We could do this together.

Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities.

People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

How is it possible you have caught me off guard, he seemed to ask. Exactly where have I miscalculated the velocities, how have I misjudged the vectors?

…required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you’re really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn’t usually work out that way.

The nation has been turned upside down and inside out. The country that was once discovered by people seeking religious freedom is now oppressing religious rights. It has been a slow train rumbling down the...

The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing...

Before we go on from here, I just want to say,” he paused and took a step closer to me and reached his hand out to my heart. “What I should have said back on...

That was a stupid idea I made up while drunk. Why did someone build that?

He pries me from his chest and drops his hand from the back of my head, tracing my ear, along my jawline. He snatches his fingers a moment before they press into my lip.

We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them.

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it’s my ambition to create something compelling – something unputdownable and riveting – that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

Anyone could be anybody. (Eric)

They like it here. There’s a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don’t usually make much trouble.

It is a fiction that [Fifth Street] is a four-lane street. It’s a two-lane street with two left-turn lanes.

Siempre hay algo que se aprende, siempre se aprende algo importante

American houses…’ she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. ‘They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what...

I had finally become aware of how much I was capable of, how little I had to lose, and how deep into Douglas’s soft sand I had sunk. Magellan’s letters, which Douglas had recited, had...

Karl Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”Carrie Fisher: “I did masses of opiates religiously.

Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.

The Witcher had a knife to his throat. He was wallowing in a wooden tub, brimfull with soapsuds, his head thrown agains the slippery rim. The bitter taste of soap lingered in his mouth as...

These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their...