3,834 Quotes About Fiction

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

He could tell a storm was coming, he smelt it in the air and saw it in the way the clouds moved. He relished the rain to come; it had a purity about it as if it could wash away all his doubts, all his intentions and quell his sense of guilt when hard choices had to be made.

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Our fictions are, collectively, the dream-work of humanity. We dream these dreams to amuse ourselves, but also so that we will be more sane when we awake.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

The strangest thing about demons is that they come to love you. As much as they try to murder the very core of you when you first meet, they become your closest companions. I never asked for this devil on my shoulder. But my eyes are burning and I’m not alone. If you see a red gaze at midheaven, look away. It’s exactly as they say: hell is a hungry place.

I guess the fact that the three of us have had these diagnoses hanging over our heads makes us empathetic toward one another. When it is just us three, it is so much easier to be ourselves because we don’t have to try so hard. We all just understand each other and have become inseparable ever since.