Perfectionirritates aswell asit attracts, infictionasinlife.

-Auchincloss, Louis Stanton
  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.

-Auden,W(ystan) H(ugh)
  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.

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

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

-Bevan, Aneurin
  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.

-Bowen, Catherine Shober ne¤  e Drinker
  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.

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

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

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

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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

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

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

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

-Disch,Thomas M(ichael)
  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.

-Fadiman, Clifton
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 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
  On Parade's End.

   We have escapist fiction†why not escapist biography?

-Galbraith,John Kenneth
  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.

-Galbraith,John Kenneth
  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.

-Gervais, Ricky
  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.

-Malamud, Bernard
  Dubin's Lives.

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

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

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

-Paley, Grace ne¤  e  Goodside
  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.

-Roth, Philip Milton
  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.

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