fiction

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.

—Weldon, Fay originally Franklin Birkinshaw

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

—Wilson, SirAngus FrankJohnstone

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

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

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.

—Malamud, Bernard

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

—Trollope,Joanna

   We have escapist fiction†why not escapist biography?

—Galbraith,John Kenneth

every 'I' is a fiction finally.

—Walcott, Derek Alton

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.

—Bowen, Catherine Shober ne¤  e Drinker

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.

—Gervais, Ricky

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.

—Banks, Lynne Reid

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

—Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith)

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

—Paley, Grace ne¤  e  Goodside

   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 goingöto the level of the light vouchsafed meöto write a work that should have for its purpose the obviating of all future wars.

—Ford, Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer

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

—Updike,John Hoyer

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

—Updike,John Hoyer

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.

—Auden,W(ystan) H(ugh)

Perfectionirritates aswell asit attracts, infictionasinlife.

—Auchincloss, Louis Stanton

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

—Buruma, Ian

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

—Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia ne¤  e Stephen

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

—Byatt, Dame A(ntonia) S(usan) ne¤  e Drabble

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

—Bevan, Aneurin

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.

—Updike,John Hoyer

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

—Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis)

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

—Stevens,Wallace

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

—Stevens,Wallace

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

—Fadiman, Clifton

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

—Disch,Thomas M(ichael)

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

—Disch,Thomas M(ichael)

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

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

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

—Updike,John Hoyer

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

—Galbraith,John Kenneth

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.

—Roth, Philip Milton

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

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills