I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn’t exist.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

…all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s...

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors–we hope–of your life come from reading fiction.

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..

The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing – and everything – about it is real.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

T.G.T.B.T: too good to be true.

A good book isn’t written, it’s rewritten.

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational...

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end...

Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth...

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”[Q&A with...

A related question is where in time to begin. Should you begin far back in a character’s past and move forward, or should you begin in the present and make use of flashbacks only where...

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our...

There were no absolutes in fiction, no certain way to deliver what was needed. So it was no surprise most technical writers considered novel-writing a gateway to madness.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

Why should I want to make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot...

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill.

The best fiction is true.

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today...

I love fictional characters…they can’t break your heart.

Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,How much would novels gain by the exchange!How differently the world would men behold!

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That’s why imaginary things are often...

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the...

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be...

You should never read just for “enjoyment.” Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick “hard books.” Ones you have to concentrate...

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

But wishes are only granted in fairy tales.

The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue …

Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.

A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.

One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

All stories are true. But some of them never happened.