Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.
Robert Louis Stevenson

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
Ralph Ellison

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
Ralph Ellison

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Vladimir Nabokov

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.
David Foster Wallace

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
David Foster Wallace

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.
Al Sharpton

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.
Thomas Huxley

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
Neil Gaiman

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
Philip Pullman

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.
Jeanne Moreau

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

There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened.
Julius Erving

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

I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
Francis Ford Coppola

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing

Aren't most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women.
Nora Roberts