Selected fiction quotes

1. A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

2. The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

3. That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

4. There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

5. The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

6. The monsters act out our rage. They act on their worst impulses, which is appealing to a certain part of us. They get punished for it, but we've enjoyed the spectacle of their liberation.

7. Her name was called Lady Helena Herring and her age was 25 and she mated well with the earl.

8. I think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.

9. Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!

10. I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

11. The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

12. The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appears as a natural, almost unnoticed relief, like some of the challenging illnesses wiped out by drug and vaccines.

13. Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.

14. We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries.

15. A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what any one would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is.

16. I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

17. By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.

18. Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

19. There was a very consistent creation of a virtual reality, and eventually it collided with our old-fashioned, ordinary reality.

20. Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

21. Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

22. About First Landing by Robert Zubrin: Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.

23. About Antrax by Terry Brooks: I wonder if he's planning a book called SRS? Or F'lu?

24. [Elizabeth Moon's] antagonists are always evil moustache-twirlers. She could write a book about a golf open and the main rival to the hero would turn out to have clubs made from compressed kittens.

25. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

26. The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

27. I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

28. Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

29. The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths.

30. Nothing in this book is true.

31. Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

32. If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

33. All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

34. Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

35. Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

36. In pulp fiction it is a rigid convention that the hero's shoulders and the heroine's balcon constantly threaten to burst their bonds, a possibility which keeps the audience in a state of tense expectancy. Unfortunately for the fans, however, recent tests reveal that the wisp of chiffon which stands between the publisher and the postal laws has the tensile strength of drop-forged steel.

37. That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

38. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

39. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

40. And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.

41. 'Noelle's Treasure Tale' is based on the historical fact that three Spanish galleons full of treasure sunk off Florida's treasure coast and have never been recovered. I have a beach house on the Treasure Coast, and I'm out there with my snorkel looking for the treasure.

42. And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this ... Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness.

43. If you need to tell your readers something...there are only two characters that you can put it convincingly into their dialogue. One is Hermione, the other is Dumbledore. In both cases you accept, it's plausible that they have, well Dumbledore knows pretty much everything anyway, but that Hermione has read it somewhere. So, she's handy.

44. I think I'd most like to spend a day with Harry. I'd take him out for a meal and apologize for everything I've put him through.

45. 'Ninjas are TOTALLY SWEET, what with all the guitar solos & flipping out & totally chopping people's heads off.'

46. 'One cave she wolf go too farther, and I wolf leaf her' he said to his fave rave horse. Of course the horse didn't answer, because as you know they cannot speak, least of all to a garlic eating, stinking, little yellow greasy fascist bastard catholic Spaniard. They soon made it up howevans and Jesus and wee Spastic were once morphia unitely in a love that knew no suzie. The only thing that puzzled Jesus was why his sugarboot got so annoyed when he called her his little Spastic in public.

47. It makes me itchy, this wry fatalism, but it doesn't make me itch nearly as much as the heroes of so many other modern novels for whom stalking the savage libido is more fun than kinship or community; who will leave town either to find their callow selves, as if they'd lost anything important, or, more transgressively, to kill a bear, a bull, a whale, a unicorn, a hippogriff, a signifier or, preferably, their fathers.

48. Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art.

49. Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlon. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language - religion, letters, metaphysics - all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.

50. It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlon comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time.

51. Heathcliff, it's me - Cathy.

52. As in my other works of fiction: All persons living and dead are purely coincidental, and should not be construed. No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent. Angels protect the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.

53. Someone or something was in this room, something or someone with the power to make people forget. ... He was reaching for the stunner on his desk when something caught his eye. It was the dossier for Matthew Keller, senior. A crude drawing defaced its yellow cover. Two open arcs, joined, in black ink. Three small closed loops beneath. The bleeding heart. It certainly hadn't been there before. Jesus Pietro opened the folder. He could smell his own fear, and feel it, in the cool perspiration that soaked his shirt. As if he'd been afraid for hours.

54. It has been said that a careful reading of Anna Karenina, if it teaches you nothing else, will teach you how to make strawberry jam.

55. Amy: 'One periwink--' Advertisment. 'One periwinkle sash belonging to Mr. N. Winkle, has been 'abscondated' from the washline. Which, gentlemen, desires any reports leading to its recovery.'

56. If you would have your fiction live forever, you must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach; but you must covertly preach and covertly teach.

57. She begged me to say something, but I let her squeeze it out herself. ' The police came again, but Berga wouldn't tell them anything.' The tongue moistened the lips again. The scarlet was starting to wash away and I could see the natural tones of of wet flesh. ' The other men came... they were different from the police. Federal men, I think. They took her away. Before she came back...Those men came.' She put something into the last three words that wasn't in the others, some breathless, nameless fear. Her hands were tight balls with the nails biting into the palms. A glassiness had passed over her eyes while she thought about it, then vanished as if afraid it had been seen.

58. They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there. 'Drunk,' the cop said. The other one turned me around into the light. 'He don't smell bad. That cut on his head didn't come from a fall either.' 'Mugged?' 'Maybe.' I didn't give a damn which way they called it. They were both wrong anyhow. Two hours ago I was drunk. Not now. Two hours ago I was a roaring lion. Then the bottle sailed across the room. No lion left now. Now was a time when I wasn't anything. Nothing was left inside except the feeling a ship must have when it's torpedoed, sinks and hits bottom.

59. I was the first one probably in writing to use a nickname, Mickey, and it stuck.

60. If you need me, Neil and me will be hanging out with the Dream King. Neil says 'hi', by the way...

61. Gaiman has also been tributed by having a race of alien beings named after him on the television and book series 'Babylon 5.' 'The Gaim' are a race of beings with long, fly-like faces remniscent of the mask worn by Gaiman's 'Sandman' character.

62. Fiction is a very poor tool for conversion, because if I label it as fiction then I'm telling you it's a pack of lies from the very start.

63. Faster than light travel - do I think it could happen in the way I describe? [snort] No.

64. You need to remember that what you're dealing with here is the ideas I had when I was 16 that I'm putting in my fiction now.

65. We'll never forget you, Mary Poppins!

66. Throughout their children's novels, Lewis and Travers bring together heterogeneous collections of characters from all orders of being - humanity, mythology (Greek, Norse, Christian), the animal world (both talking and nontalking beasts), and other fictional sources (for example, nursery rhyme and fairytale figures) - and have them mingle in festival-like gatherings reminiscent of medieval carnival celebrations. ... the interaction among these disparate characters often results in the suspension of hierarchical barriers...

67. So she said banteringly: 'What's the unit of exchange in this different world of yours?'

68. One's moviegoing tastes and habits change - I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live - for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we're tired of.

69. Well, it's always very difficult to say what prompts anybody to do anything, let alone getting underwater and teaching ravens to fly. But I think it probably all dates back to a very early age, when I was quite a young fellow. My mother, Lady Beryl Streeb-Greebling, you know, the wonderful dancer - 107 tomorrow and still dancing - she came up to me in the conservatory - I was pruning some walnuts - and she said 'Arthur' - I wasn't Sir Arthur in those days - she said 'Arthur, if you don't get underwater and start teaching ravens to fly, I'll smash your stupid face off,' and I think it was this that sort of first started my interest in the whole business of getting them underwater.

70. Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.

71. Bolano's narrative style is fragmented and loaded. It is also full of a strange kind of gallows humour, as we are swept along by stories that are invented and presented entirely convincingly, only to be suddenly brought up short by a reminder that this has not been done innocently.

72. The beautiful Monique insists on joining their expedition and cannot be dissuaded; we think at first she has a nefarious motive, but no, she's probably taken a class in screenplay construction and knows that the film requires a sexy female lead. This could be the first case in cinematic history of a character voluntarily entering a movie because of the objective fact that she is required.

73. As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact. Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions. My notion is that JFK is no more, or less, factual than Stone's Nixon or Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator, Amistad, Out of Africa, My Dog Skip or any other movie based on 'real life.' All we can reasonably ask is that it be skillfully made and seem to approach some kind of emotional truth.

74. In an extreme instance, in which there is a Propervirt of less than 0.9%, the TEXT OF THE PRESENT PROSPECTUS may likewise undergo an ABRUPT change. If, while you are reading these sentences, the words begin to jump about, and the letters quiver and blur, please interrupt your reading for ten or twenty seconds to wipe your glasses, adjust your clothing, or the like, and then start reading AGAIN from the beginning, and NOT JUST from the place where your reading was interrupted, since such a TRANSFORMATION indicates that a correction of DEFICIENCIES is now taking place.

75. Anton Chekhov wrote that 'one must not put a loaded rifle on stage if no one is thinking of firing it.' Good drama requires spare and purposive action, sensible linking of potential causes with realized effects. Life is much messier; nothing happens most of the time. Millions of Americans (many hotheaded) own rifles (many loaded), but the great majority, thank God, do not go off most of the time. We spend most of real life waiting for Godot, not charging once more unto the breach.

76. Synopsis of Previous Chapters: There are no Previous Chapters.

77. I always thought Detritus would be good at: 'I bet you're wondrin' how many time I fired dis crossbow--'

78. DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot'.

79. Miss Amy:'Never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure.'

80. This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

81. Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.

82. Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations - that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling.

83. Dilsey stroked Ben's head, slowly and steadily, smoothing the bang upon his brow. He wailed quietly, unhurriedly. 'Hush,' Dilsey said. 'Hush, now. We be gone in a minute. Hush, now.' He wailed quietly and steadily.

84. I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh... they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page.

85. A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values.

86. Speaker for the Dead

87. Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey

88. Ground to Major bye-bye Tom

89. 'I simply love what you've done with this place! (to Two-Face) Heavy Metal meets House & Garden! Ha ha ha! It's so...dark and gothic! Despisingly decedant! And yet so...bright and chipper, and (hops happily across)..conservative. Very few people are both a summer and a winter, but...you pull it off nicely.' (Batman Forever)

90. Well, that glove's fulla vaseline. Vaseline? What the hell for? Well, I tell ya what - Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife.' Ch. 2, p.29

91. Who are the inventors of Tlon? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor - an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly - has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlon was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it.

92. Deep inside himself, in a place he didn't often go, where he kept the things he didn't like to think about but dared not forget, he knew that [she] was still alive somewhere, and somehow she was watching what he did, or at least looking in on him from time to time

93. This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be; The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying 'Boo!'. Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian, it's Halloween.

94. On September 6, 1995 La Stampa, Turin's daily newspaper, titled at full page 'Is Mary Poppins really Satan?'. Many readers were, understandably, surprised but no reader was more astonished than the undersigned. In fact I learned from the article that I had accused Mary Poppins to have 'clear links with the esoteric and satanic thought'. I was credited for having discovered that 'under the gentle mask of the extraordinary nanny a dangerous creature was hidden, with features no less than satanic'. The same journalist, appropriately, interviewed an exorcist who complained that 'Introvigne normally minimizes the presence of Satan in our life' (a reference to my book on Satanism, where I argue that the number of real Satanists is minimum compared to the number of those who promote Satanism scares). But this, for the exorcist, amounted to still more convincing evidence that Mary Poppins was really satanic: 'If someone like Massimo Introvigne has written such a thing, this could only mean that the danger is really there'. The problem was, however, that I had never written such a thing.

95. I actually believe she liked the film a lot more than she let on publicly ... You have to remember that she was, above all, a great storyteller. And in the long line of storytellers who have faith in an oral tradition, who believe that for a great book or books to survive, they have to be retold or reinvented for each generation

96. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

97. The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

98. If you would have your fiction live forever, you must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach; but you must covertly preach and covertly teach.

99. Goddamn the Warner Brothers to hell for giving Marvin the Martain the raygun.

100. Walter would see that commercial... probably having breakfast, let's say. He'd very, very delicately pad his mouth dry with his napkin, turn his television set off, get in his car, probably go to some area like a suburban mall and within two to three hours, three women would be hanging upside-down, gutted and their blood drained.