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fiction quotes

  • Perfectionirritates aswell asit attracts, infictionasinlife.

    - Louis Stanton Auchincloss
      Pioneers and Caretakers:  A Study of Nine American Women Novelists.

  • Political history isfar too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young.Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

    -W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
      A Certain World.

  • Jane Austen is the only novelist I know whose peculiar genius lies in taking perfectly ordinary people through ordinary situations, and transmogrifying them into fascinating fiction.

    - Lynne Reid Banks
      In her entry in Contemporary Novelists, 5th edn.

  • I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

    - Aneurin Bevan
      In The Times, 29 Mar.

  • In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if theyare, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink.

    - Catherine Shober ne  e Drinker Bowen
      In Publisher's Weekly, 24 Mar. Bowen's biographies were frequently partly fictionalized.

  • Isherwood did not so much find himself in Berlin as reinvent himself; Isherwood became a fiction, a work of art.

    - Ian Buruma
      Of Christopher Isherwood. In the New Republic, 4 Nov.

  • Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self- indulgent fiction.

    - Dame A(ntonia) S(usan) ne  e Drabble Byatt
      'The Day That E.M. Forster Died'.

  • Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

    - G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton
    The Defendant,'Defence of Penny Dreadfuls'.

  • A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.

    -Thomas M(ichael) Disch
      In The Face, Mar.

  • Science fiction, like Brazil, is where the nuts come from. SeeThomas 852:53.

    -Thomas M(ichael) Disch
      In the Observer, 23  Aug.

  • The police dog of American fiction, except that his hatred isnottheresultof mere crabbednessbut of aneye that sees too deep for comfort.

    - Clifton Fadiman
    Of US writer Ring Lardner. Quoted in Scott Meredith George S Kaufman and His Friends (1974).

  •    I have always had the greatest contempt for novels written with a purpose. Fiction should render, not draw morals. But†I sinned against my gods to the extent of saying that I was goingto the level of the light vouchsafed meto write a work that should have for its purpose the obviating of all future wars.

    - Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer Ford
      On Parade's End.

  •    We have escapist fiction†why not escapist biography?

    -John Kenneth Galbraith
      In the NewYork Times, 27  Jul.

  • The line dividing the state from what is called private enterprise, orat least fromthehighlyorganized part of it, is a traditional fiction.

    -John Kenneth Galbraith
      The New Industrial State.

  • Fact is stranger than fiction.You see people walking down the street that would never be allowed on television.You have to tone it down.

    - Ricky Gervais
      On the  Jo Whiley show, BBC Radio1, 30 Sep.

  • The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

    - Bernard Malamud
      Dubin's Lives.

  • Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

    - H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
      Prejudices, 3rd series, ch.7.

  • Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world.That'swhy it almost alwayshastobe onthesideof the underdog.

    - Grace ne  e  Goodside Paley
      In Ms magazine.

  • I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

    - Philip Milton Roth
      Of critics. Deception,'Philip'.

  • Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven.

    -Wallace Stevens
      Harmonium,'A High-Toned Old ChristianWoman'.

  • Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

    -Wallace Stevens
    Quoted in Helen Gardner (ed) The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1991).

  • Contentment and fulfilment don't make for very good fiction.

    -Joanna Trollope
      In TheTimes, 25 Jun.

  • Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetryas hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

    -John Hoyer Updike
      HuggingThe Shore, foreword.

  •    But whenhashappiness everbeenthesubject of fiction? The pursuit of it is just thata pursuit.

    -John Hoyer Updike
      The Early Stories:1953^1975, foreword.

  • The great temple of fiction has no well-marked front portal; most devoteesarrivethrough a side door, and not dressed for worship.

    -John Hoyer Updike
      Self-Consciousness, III.'GettingTheWords Out'.

  • The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

    -John Hoyer Updike
      Rabbit Angstrom:The Four Novels, introduction.

  • every 'I' is a fiction finally.

    - Derek Alton Walcott
      Omeros, bk.1, ch.5, section 2.

  • It will do us no harm to retool our imaginations. AIDS is a major revolution in how writers write† Our heroes and heroines will have to change. The only thing AIDS is good for is fiction.Writers will have to thinkdifferently.

    - Fay originally Franklin Birkinshaw Weldon
      In The Guardian,7 Mar.

  • You should study the Peerage,Gerald† It is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
      Lord Illingworth. AWoman of No Importance, act 3.

  • The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
      Miss Prism.The Importance of Being Earnest, act 2.

  • Henry James wrote fiction as if it were a painful duty.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
    Attributed.

  • All fiction is for me a kind of magic and trickerya confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

    - SirAngus FrankJohnstone Wilson
      In The Paris Review, no.17.

  • Awoman must have moneyand a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

    - (Adeline) Virginia ne  e Stephen Woolf
      A Room of One's Own, ch.1.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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