3,834 Quotes About Fiction

Only in lament does the artist cry out, 'Birds build but not I build," and the lament points to how things ought to be: art builds; it never stands pat; it destroys only evil. If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation. This, I have claimed, is what true art is about-preservation of the world of gods and men.

We are rich in schools which speak of how art 'works' and avoid the whole subject of what work it ought to do.

Show me a man that gets rich by being a politician, and I'll show you a crook.

my boy? he is evenbetter than books. -fiction has nothing on you.

So you're going to have to ask yourselves on simple question: Which one of us is speaking now?

As to fictions which represent nothing, teach nothing, and from which nothing results, are they anything more than falsities? And if they are incoherent and heaped together without choice, are they anything better than dreams?

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.

It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.

The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.