Quotes about Fiction

Most of the history is a divine work of fiction.

Real life isn't required to be logical, but fiction has to make sense.

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view...none of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good.  She need not judge...She need only show seperate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show that they had equal value.  That was the only moral a story need have.

Life is like a box of chocolates, you open it up, and someone's taken a bite outta each and every one.

I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously “present,” an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be. The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

I’d never seen a leper before. To be honest I didn’t really believe in them. I’d always assumed they were just made-up Biblical characters like Jesus, God and Satan.

It would be Halloween. It’s always Halloween in my imaginary life. Even in my earliest years, the ones I never technically experienced but only heard about from my biographers, it was Halloween—Halloween a metaphor for donning a mask of “reality” and becoming a spy in order to expose the “real” world’s fictitious underbelly.

I’m arguably the least real of all my characters, a state of affairs for which I make no apologies, being, indeed, altogether proud of the fact. I am, as it were, the created creating--a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

I was sick to the bone of disappearing by degrees, dissolving into library walls, playing my sad little violin of loneliness as time’s invisible ink wrote out my meaningless days even as it erased them. We imaginary people must live the Adventure passionately, set ourselves down with the liquefied marrow of Experience, or else lament the Moment’s passing with a whimper as our unrecorded voices are swallowed by silence.

If we’re to avoid becoming fiction robots in a corporate world, we must stop adding to our educational excesses, eschew the assembly line of MFAs and bottom-line publishing houses, commit ourselves to a way of writing that engages in a valiant struggle to push the limits of plot and language so as to awaken, not anaesthetize, the reader.

Theory does everything in its power to remove the living soul of literature, tear its heart out, make of the study of Art a hard-edged Science. Never mind that Art is as far removed from measurement as Science is from love. As writers confronting theory, it’s incumbent on us not to let our prose dry up in that desert, but to allow it to become a desert rose, our prose, flourishing in the heat and sands of what passes for knowledge.

There is a rhythm throughout the universe. The pulsation throbs within every heart, during each moment of ecstacy, in every birth contraction. The rhythm exists in the pull of the ocean tide, around the weight of each raindrop, woven into every cocoon.
The sequence, the progression, is what we call time. Our time of influence affects the expansion of the universe. Heaven is eager to learn how we will add to the growth of eternal existence.
God is ready to respond as you take part in creation.
The rhythm never ends, it only strengthens and expands.
This life force is you. You are the mystery.
You are the journey. You are exquisite.
You are here.
Now, it's your time.

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction insofar as we are all, each and every one of us, including yours truly, and including you (perhaps most of all), works of fiction. Beyond that, it is pure and absolute nonfiction; and though its “author” technically never existed, at least not in the dense, empirical, flesh-and-blood sense, the personages and events herein depicted are drawn straight from life, as it were. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual places, living or dead, while purely coincidental from the point of view of intention, should surprise no one.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

"I'm not lying, I'm writing fiction with my mouth."

My name is Ishmael.

Only a year ago, I was about to get my doctorate from an Ivy League university that was going to offer me a prestigious faculty appointment. My university mentor was encouraging me to publish my dissertation as a self-help book that he thought would be  a best seller. To boot, I was engaged to a wonderful woman who thought I was a fit mate. Never in my wildest imagination could I have dreamed of such good fortune.

I was also keeping a journal of my metamorphosis from an insecure graduate student into a journeymen psychologist. I intended to include as a case study a psychopath, a patient of mine who believed he could become President of the United States. Though he would be only a footnote, I thought he'd provide a dramatic opening. Of course I didn't intend to use his real name. But now, after all that happened, everyone knows who he is.

Back then, when I tried to preserve his anonymity, I could never have imagined he would try to kill me. Nor that I would plan to assassinate him. 

One important source of unhappiness is the habit of putting off living to some fictional future date. Men and women are constantly making themselves unhappy because in deferring their lives to the future they lose sight of the the present and its golden opportunities for rich living.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

Victory is a political fiction.

Truth is stranger than Fiction, for Fiction is obliged to stick to probability; and Truth ain't

Youth is stranger than fiction.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. . . . Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of "I" and "mine," self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. . . . {The ego's greatest triumph} is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of all fiction.