The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.
Tracey Emin

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
Francis Bacon

I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.
Jack Nicholson

You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.
Robert Duvall

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
Raymond Chandler

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
Roald Dahl

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.
Roald Dahl

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
Jean Baudrillard

One of the reasons I did this, because I wasn't really looking for another science fiction film, was that my daughter can see it. She's 9 and it's really a good film for all ages.
Sigourney Weaver

I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.
Sigourney Weaver

Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.
Malcolm Forbes

Like everybody at that age, I read an awful lot of pulp fiction. But at the same time, I also read quite a bit of history and read that as much for pleasure as part of a curriculum.
John Hume

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
Arthur C. Clarke

Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases.
David Brin

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
David Brin

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
David Brin

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Joan Didion

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
Louis L'Amour

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.
Arthur Golden