Fictional Narrative Quotes

Batman is like the audience's eyes and ears in 'Justice League Dark.'

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I would rather be part of something that is entertaining than realistic.

The best angles and the best stories always hinge on reality. Throughout the history of WWE, all the best storylines have a little touch of what's real behind them.

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

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.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

All that I did was to avail myself of the great privileges of the fiction writer, spring over every scientific difficulty with fancy’s seven-leagued boots, and create on paper what other men were planning out in steel and other metals.

I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

This is an IMAGINARY STORY...aren't they all?

If this were a made-up story, it would begin at night, with a storm blowing and owls hooting and rattling noises under the bed.

Can fiction teach us? Absolutely. Fiction has the power to illustrate place, era, and atmosphere in vivid detail. But it is not Anthropology for Dummies.

The rules of drama are very much separate from the properties of life. I think that's especially true of Shakespeare.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.