fiction

1.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

- Stone, Robert

2.

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

- William Shakespeare

3.

Works of fiction, if only well gotten up, have always their advantages in the hearts of listeners over plain, homely truth.

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

4.

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

- Mark Twain

5.

I didn't lie--I was writing fiction in my mouth.

- Homer Simpson

6.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

- Shaw, George Bernard

7.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

- Ivana Trump

8.

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

9.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

- Roosevelt, Eleanor

10.

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.

- Baudrillard, Jean

11.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

- West, Jessamyn

12.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

- Irving, John

13.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

- King, Stephen

14.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

- Hemingway, Ernest

15.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

- Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction.

- Ian McKellen

17.

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.

- Joyce, James

18.

Being is a fiction invented by those who suffer from becoming.

- Dowell, Coleman

19.

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

- Nemerov, Howard

20.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

- Rushdie, Salman