c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.
— Joyce Carol Oates
But you have such dimples," said Anne, smiling affectionately into the pretty, vivacious face so near her own. "Lovely dimples, like little dents in cream. I have given up all hope of dimples. My dimple-dream will never come true; but so many of my dreams have that I mustn't complain. Am I all ready now?
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
They weren't true stories
—  they were better than that.
Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and childbirth. For the women who deserved more than their husband's whim.
— Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl
When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.
— Leif Enger, Peace Like a River
There was nowhere to go, but I turned to go and met Atticus's vest front. I buried my head in it and listened to the small internal noises that went on behind the light blue cloth: his watch ticking, the faint crackle of his starched shirt, the soft sound of his breathing.'Your stomach's growling,' I said.'I know it,' he said.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
— Edmund Crispin
We're all prostitutes sir we're all selling ourselves for something
— Saira Viola
Nothing in the world has a greater power to enslave than fiction. ~ Aarush Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
— Eudora Welty
That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I'm fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.
— Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone
Literature is a virus.
— Corey Redekop, Shelf Monkey
People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.
— John Updike, The Widows of Eastwick
One couldn’t be selective when remembering the past. Ignore the turmoil, chaos and pain – and the truly great memories would not shine with such luster.
— Karen Fowler, Memories For Sale
…Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I’m deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of the New Age about it—not because of the practices themselves, which as far as I can tell from a safe distance may well have a lot to them, but because of the people who get involved who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who’s just discovered Kerouak, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs…
— Tana French, In the Woods
I transform fiction into memory.
— Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado
It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion.' Hunger artists, fat folks, giants, and dog acts come and go but real freaks never lose their appeal.
— Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
Find your self love. Find that precious thing inside you thatmakes you want to live. And when you’ve found it, hold on to it with onehand, and use the other to claw your way back home.-Ripple
— Valjeanne Jeffers, The Time of Legend
Those of us who believe in princesses are often laughed at. But I believe the world needs princesses and dukes and queens and kings. We need people who glitter and shine and make a room silent with their entrance. We need them the same way we need ice cream and soccer and music and stories. Oh, how we need stories.
— Beverly Bartlett
Why write a song when no one can play the notes or understand the lyrics?
— Christopher Moore, Bloodsucking Fiends
The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.
— Charles Dickens
The black bird cocked its head to one side, and then said, in a voice like stones being struck, 'You shadow man.''I'm Shadow,' said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn's rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and its eyes were black beads. There was something intimidating about a bird that size, this close.'Says he will see you in Kay-ro.' tokked the raven. Shadow wondered which of Odin's ravens this was: Huginn or Munnin, Memory or Thought.'Kay-ro?' he asked.'In Egypt.''How am I going to go to Egypt?''Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal.''Look,' said Shadow, 'I don't want to seem like I'm-- Jesus, look...' he paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi. 'Okay. What I'm trying to say is I don't want mysteries.''Mysteries,' agreed the bird helpfully.'What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does not help me. It's a line from a bad spy thriller.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
They were going to expel me. Mom convinced them not to... and got them to apologize," Fern said, almost embarrassed.Really?" Eddie said. "See, Sammy, you don't mess with the Commander, do you?" Eddie playfully hit his younger brother in the stomach with the back of his hand.When the Commander says jump...," Sam started.We say, 'yes ma'am, how high?'" Eddie ended with a forehead salute.
— Jennifer Anne Kogler
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
— Mark Twain
Let’s all try to be fearless, sometimes we wish for the most perfect of outcomes and we arrive at the most unforgettable. Life can be scary and leave us hiding, but when we come out of hiding, we may realize, that life was the one thing that we could always count on…
— Holly Hood, Scattered and Broken
Most fan fiction is terrible.
— Neal Pollack
A good friend will help you move, but a true friend will help you move a body.
— Steven J. Daniels, Weeds in The Garden of Love
For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.
— John Cheever
When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.
— William Gibson
It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.
— Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina
I knew I would stay in this town when I found the blue enamel pot floating in the lake. The pot led me to the house, the house led me to the book, the book to the lawyer, the lawyer to the whorehouse, the whorehouse to science, and from science I joined the world.
— Leslie Daniels, Cleaning Nabokov's House
They placed their bets with such self righteous bravado, but I’m the one who lost.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Damned
They played, not beautifully but deep, ignoring their often discordant strings and striking right into the heart of the music they knew best, the true notes acting as their milestones. On the poop above their heads, where the weary helmsmen tended the new steering-oar and Babbington stood at the con, the men listened intently; it was the first sound of human life that they had heard, apart from the brief Christmas merriment, for a time they could scarcely measure.
— Patrick O'Brian, Desolation Island
May was the best person I ever knew.... She understood people and she let them be whatever way they needed to be. She had faith in every single person she ever met, and this never failed her, for nobody ever disappointed May. Seems people knew she saw the very best of them, and they'd turn that side to her to give her a better look.
— Cynthia Rylant
I am the Captain of my own life.
— Lexis De Rothschild, The Cat Letters: A Tale of Longing, Adventure and True Love
Anne has small superstitions which she uses to dispel anxieties. For instance, if she can make it to the fourth stain on the carpet by the time the elevator door closes, that means Nate has thought positively about her today, and there is a future where they know each other. It becomes a one-sided competition when a negative consequence is imagined: if she cannot touch two different kinds of tile with her feet by the time the toilet flushes, that means she said something crucially “wrong” in an email, and Nate will never contact her again. She doesn't keep track of which side is winning.
— Megan Boyle
Real life doesn't grant us many of the more than useful possibilities people can come out with in fiction.
— Camilo Gomes Jr., Em memória
I find the title How to Be Good. Curious, I open it up. I'm disappointed to find it's fiction.
— Jael McHenry, The Kitchen Daughter
… Shannon’s fingers itched to smash the man in the face. Inside his head he kept telling himself, Keep cool, baby, absolutely cool.
— Frederick Forsyth, The Dogs of War
There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.
— Orson Scott Card
He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that had never been exercised before. It was a demonstration of 'nature.' He was a birth-wet foal rising to his feet.
— Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly.
— Miriam Toews
The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.
— Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.
— Brion Gysin
Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
I have often wondered, Sir, [. . .] to observe so few Instances of Charity among Mankind; for tho' the Goodness of a Man's Heart did not incline him to relieve the Distresses of his Fellow-Creatures, methinks the Desire of Honour should move him to it. What inspires a Man to build fine Houses, to purchase fine Furniture, Pictures, Clothes, and other things at a great Expence, but an Ambition to be respected more than other People? Now would not one great Act of Charity, one Instance of redeeming a poor Family from all the Miseries of Poverty, restoring an unfortunate Tradesman by a Sum of Money to the means of procuring a Livelihood by his Industry, discharging an undone Debtor from his Debts or a Goal, or any such Example of Goodness, create a Man more Honour and Respect than he could acquire by the finest House, Furniture, Pictures or Clothes that were ever beheld? For not only the Object himself who was thus relieved, but all who heard the Name of such a Person must, I imagine, reverence him infinitely more than the Possessor of all those other things: which when we so admire, we rather praise the Builder, the Workman, the Painter, the Laceman, the Taylor, and the rest, by whose Ingenuity they are produced, than the Person who by his Money makes them his own.
— Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews / Shamela
I don't watch reality TV, my reality is tough enough.
— Alisa Steinberg, Text Me, A Tale of Love and Technology
It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
— Nicola Chiaromonte
It didn't take me long out there, in the landscapes my father had painted, to realize that as much as I loved my country [Australia], I barely knew it. I'd spent so many years studying the art of our immigrant cultures, and barely any time at all on the one that had been here all along....So I set myself a crash course and became a pioneer in a new field: desperation conservation. My job became the documentation and preservation of ancient Aboriginal rock art, before the uranium and bauxite companies had a chance to blast it into rubble" (pp. 345-346)
— Geraldine Brooks
Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist.
— Donna Tartt
Tell me your Dreams and I'll write you a Fantasy. Tell me your Fantasies and I'll paint you a Dream for the minds eye you can get lost in!
— George H.W. Bush
Taut, intelligent, and intense suspense that is deeply human.”—Mark Greaney, New York Times Bestselling Author of Gunmetal Gray“Exciting and well-layered....David Bell is a master storyteller with a sure hand at crafting characters you feel for and stories you relish.”—Allen Eskens, USA Today Bestselling Author of The Life We Bury“A tense and twisty suspense novel about the dark secrets that lie buried within a community and a father who can save his daughter only by uncovering them. Will leave parents wondering just how well they truly know their children.”—Hester Young, author of The Gates of Evangeline and The Shimmering Road“A gripping, immersive tour-de-force full of twists and turns. BRING HER HOME kept me flipping the pages late into the night. Don’t expect to sleep until you’ve finished reading this book. I could not put it down!”—A. J. Banner, bestselling author of The Good Neighbor and The Twilight Wife“In David Bell’s riveting BRING HER HOME, the unthinkable is only the beginning. From there, the story races through stunning twists all the way to its revelation, without letting its heart fall away in the action. Intense, emotional, and deeply satisfying. This one will keep you up late into the night. Don't miss it!”—Jamie Mason, author of Three Graves Full and Monday’s Lie“Spellbinding and pulse-raising, BRING HER HOME hooked me from the first sentence and surprised me until the final pages. Sharply written and richly observed, this book is about the secrets we keep, the mysteries that keep us, and the lengths a father will go to for the daughter he loves. David Bell is a masterful storyteller who has perfected the art of suspense in BRING HER HOME.”—Sarah Domet, author of The Guineveres
— David      Bell, Bring Her Home
Because beautiful things never last. Not roses nor snow… And not fireworks, either
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
I’m an idiot for thinking that one performance would change anything.Maybe I should stop writing songs and start writing fiction.
— Elizabeth Eulberg, Take a Bow
Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there.It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.
— Neil Gaiman, Stories: All-New Tales
There's nothing quite as funny as someone else's misery - Cassel Sharpe
— Holly Black
The one-eyed man watched them go, and then he went through the iron shed to his shack behind. It was dark inside. He felt his way to the mattress on the floor, and he stretched out and cried in his bed, and the cars whizzing by on the highway only strengthened the walls of his loneliness.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I unlocked the deadbolt and flung the door open, stepping back for Gabby to see exactly who it was. “Hello, Sara,” I greeted.A bubble of laughter escaped Gabby before she could contain it. “Yes, hello ex-girlfriend Sara. And might I add: law-breaker? Who let you out of your cage? Don’t you know Joseph has a restraining order against you?
— Laura Kreitzer, Keepers
Surely Tillie knew glitter on wrinkled cleavage was a sin.
— Julie Anne Lindsey, Death by Chocolate
He who writes books that aim to convince is a comedian, too, just a comedian. What has he got to offer others, apart from chains, still more chains? Fiction never liberated anyone. No one ever brought anything back from voyages through dream worlds.
— Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, The Book of Flights
she should have told me that times slides away on a hillside of lose shale and takes everything in its path-dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all.
— Kristin Hannah, The Glass Case
there is something intriguing about knowing how things are going to turn out, but being constantly surprised about how they'll get there.
— Jael McHenry, The Kitchen Daughter
Have you noticed how Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen look nothing alike, and yet they both manage to look exactly like their father, Martin?
— Ken  O'Neill, The Marrying Kind
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.
— Franklin P. Adams
Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be
— Téa Obreht
*Story of a Girl By:Sara Zarr*Lexile:760 SRC:12 pts.*Personal Issues*Choice of getting a job to move out*Major Choice*In Process of making it happen*It effects her bother his girlfriend and their baby, because they will move out with her too.*Sometimes we need to take choices that will make your life easier and also others.
— Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl
My mind skidded round a very short track and passed the finish line in a matter of seconds without any sensible conclusion.
— Petra Kidd
The ocean swells around us. Sometimes, we are in a bowl of water and sometimes on the top of the lip. The horizon curves.We are sitting on top of the world.In theory, anyone is on the top of their world at every moment, given that the Earth is truly round. But, it’s hard to see that in a subway under New York City and completely obvious out here.
— Lexis De Rothschild, The Cat Letters: A Tale of Longing, Adventure and True Love
Be who you were meant to be and not what you've allowed yourself to become," Kate said to Mavis as she wavered over following her dream. from 'Lifesong
— Christine M. Knight
There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
If anyone or anything tries to curse or kill the Goodness at the Center of all things, it will just keep coming back to life. Forever Easter.
— David Housholder, The Blackberry Bush
I'm warning you. I'm going to get waxy. D'you see? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don't try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else---" Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread.
— William Golding, Lord of the Flies
By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]
— Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
Life's a lot different from what people pretend. That's why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I'm beginning to guess that everybody's like that.
— Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle
I’d always hated cocktail parties. And this one was worse than most. Overdressed pseudo–people smiled plastic smiles, told one–upmanship stories with phony self–deprecation, then half–listened with painted–on sincerity to the one–upmanship rebuttals. Mannequins. Robots. Androids. Pseudo–people laboring in the vineyards of pseudo–intellectualism to gather the bitter grapes of self–aggrandizement.
— Walt Shiel, Pilots and Normal People
He was a peculiar sight. Tears rolling down his face, shouting to drown the sound of the singing rabbit; he said he needed help, pointed to a chicken, handed over some money, grabbed his parcel and bolted out the door in panic.Boys, thought the butcher.Drugs, thought the woman.Justin Case, thought Dorothea.
— Meg Rosoff, Just in Case
Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soonas fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to thethroat and brain, from fear of violence to the more nameless kind, youcome to believe you are part of a horrible experiment. I learned todistrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When yougave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knewthat ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence. Management askedfor new ideas all the time; memos circulated down the echelons, requestingbold and challenging concepts. But I learned that new ideas could finishyou unless you wrapped them in a plastic bag. I learned that most of thesecretaries were more intelligent than most of the executives and that theexecutive secretaries were to be feared more than anyone. I learned whatclosed doors meant and that friendship was not negotiable currency and howimportant it was to lie even when there was no need to lie. Words andmeanings were at odds. Words did not say what was being said nor even itsreverse. I learned to speak a new language and soon mastered the specialelements of that tongue.
— Don DeLillo, Americana
Beauty and perfection do not guarantee grace and fulfillment and are always sacrificed. Life itself seems a ritual of sacrifice, and the world the alter on which plants and animals lay down their own lives for the sustenance of others, and on which we lay our youth, our well-being, our loved ones, and finally our lives. I am an ignorant woman who has sacrificed all of these things but the last, and cannot say for whom or what I perform this unrelenting ritual.
— Kate Horsley, Confessions of a Pagan Nun
Andrew Lloyd Webber's version of the Kool-Aid jingle is at once chilling and evocative. Donny Osmond is brilliant as James Jones.
— Christopher Moore, Bloodsucking Fiends
Religion and nationalism? I defecate on the altar of religious conviction, and wipe my arse on the flag of national pride.
— Ian Martin, Pop-Splat
Fiction is as easy as telling a convincing lie. The more believable the better the story.
— T.R. Wallace, Shadow War
They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others' faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.
— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get any
— Cormac McCarthy
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it."Goethe
— Paul Alan Fahey, When the Right One Comes Along
For the first six months, all whe wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf.
— Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time: A Novel
Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship.But she said not a word. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in.Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.'Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees.She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand.She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor.She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams--window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web--the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.
— Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
So let's just forget about the whole thing and agree never to speak of it again. And I promise I'll never lie to you again.Ah, but surely you must be saying, "Hey! Isn't this entire story a work of fiction and therefore one big lie?"Perhaps. But we already agreed never to speak of it again.
— Jason Carter Eaton, The Facttracker
A plastic surgeon should never tell anybody to age gracefully. Rather his motto should be to make people age youthfully.
— Jas Kohli
Writing to me is like being addicted to heroin… it’s hard and its mean, but you just can’t stop.
— F.D. Crandall, The Measure of a Man
An intriguing world where vampires rule, only the strongest survive, and romance offers hope in the darkest hours.
— Rachel Caine, Ghost Town
Then it doesn't matter which way you walk...-so long as I get somewhere.
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
— Ray Bradbury
(F)iction is...what ought to have been, not what actually was. At least, not exactly.
— Charles McCarry
Although when there were too many people around- which there certainly were today- it was hard even to remember to say thank you: all those people were like drowning.
— Robin McKinley
We'd become Japs, Jews, Niggers. We weren't before.
— HM Naqvi
But you've slipped under my skin, invaded my blood and seized my heart
— Valdek
Different versions of a true story
— Margi Preus
(M)ysteries in fiction are seldom as insoluble as those in life, as most writers can't resist the lure of omniscience.
— Dennis McFadden
I stole you, among others, from the streets of God’s birthplace. I forced you to work as a slave. Imprisoned, mistreated and starved you and your companion. To top it off, I am in the process of selling your life to the highest bidder. Why would you trust me?
— V.S. Carnes
Y'know when your dog drags its butt across the carpet leaving a stain- It's not as easy as it looks..." 
— Josh Stern
Democrats and Republicans were essentially the same party with different faces and that was why, no matter how many promises each leader made, significant change rarely transpired.
— James Morcan, The Ninth Orphan
How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:  Essays and Arguments
Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.
— James Van Pelt
The truth is that we all live by leaving behind
—  no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.
Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.
— David Malouf, The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.''You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry.''Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?''Before either.''I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry,' said the lad.'Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?''I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do.''Well, then you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray.''I should like that awfully.'The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. 'I shall stay with the real Dorian,' he said, sadly.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.
— Meghan Lamb
Over the green squares of the fields and the low curves of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his gaze fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so deep.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Gates of Heaven and the Gates of Hell are the same gates. It just depends which side you're standing on when you walk through.
— Amy  Lignor
The writing seemed like the books that held it; crumbly and antique and bearing the stink of centuries. Still, it was compelling. His voice was smooth and kind, and once in a while an observation that would ring so true it vibrated like flicked crystal.
— Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
Having vision is much more than just being visual.
— Heru Ofori-Atta, The Clairvoyant
Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation--who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him--but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope--qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.
— Bill Styron
She was going to go home after this and sip red wine and stare at the wall, I could tell. She would wonder why she was doing this, struggling against commercial interests at a corporate hospital when all she wanted to do was help people, and in the morning, when she walked out of her beautiful home and unlocked her convertible, she would remember.
— Max Berry
I was its skin, its movement, its shape, its god, its creator, its destroyer. And you thought Dexter was bad. The Bridgeman arrives soon.
— Catherine Astolfo
There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)
— Colm Tóibín, The Modern Library
His allure, as he stood there, his face, even with the red swollen eyes, everything about him was gorgeous.
— Maryam Schonbeck, My Heresy
He never had nothing of his own before, except the kid, and he can’t claim but half the credit, there, maybe less. T.J.’s blond like his mamma, and stubborn, too. Won’t let nobody hold him except her. Cries every time his daddy picks him up. Every time he looks in those wet blue eyes, he nearly loses it. His own son hates him. Can’t blame the kid for having an opinion.
— Nadria Tucker, The Heaviest Corner on Earth
…Mellor’s statement is extremist in two directions: human civilization is in imminent peril, and only one solution will work. I doubt both these formulations, and almost every fiction I have encountered that depends upon them.
— Richard T. Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century the Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century
Writing fiction is a way of expressing feelings and revealing a certain truth about life, goals, dreams and desires.
— Ann Marie Aguilar
Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
Human life is fiction's only theme.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.
— Orson Scott Card
We have our stories, and we speak of them, and weave them into other people's stories - that's how it goes, does it not?
— Susan Fletcher
These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes and history was always just like today full of markets and wanting.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men
You have seven writers in your basement?”Donald nods, signing, “They like it here. There’s a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don’t usually make much trouble.
— Susan Wiggs, Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices
Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
I want to be the best race horse around when I grow up, Mama.You can be, Charlie, as long as you are willing to try your best and not give up when you have a bad day.
— Deanie Humphrys-Dunne, Charlie the Horse
The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling every thought every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her as well as honour and love her for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don't get it. It's amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together''Yeah, well, that's a whole different thing.'(from Honey Pie)
— Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
LOVE is the most incendiary element ever known, once it sparks the heart, the flame is inextinguishable.
— H.S. Rissam, The scalpel: game beneath
I gave up worrying about the principles of fiction writing when I realized that there weren't any.
— Teri Louise Kelly
Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa (Mason father to his son in "The Omniconstant
— Christos Rodoulla Tsiailis
The pupil of a goat's eye is elongate like a cat's, but if you look closely you'll see that it's in the horizontal position, and if you look closer still you'll see that it's less gracefully shaped, more of a ragged slot, dirty yellow. And you'll see that the white of a goat's eye is all black.
— Eugene Marten
See, the institutions and specialist, experts, you see. Yes, yes,experts, indeed. See, they would have us believe that there is an orderto art. An explanation. Humans are odd creatures in that way. Alwayssearching for a formula. Yes, a formula to create an expected norm forunexplainable greatness. A cook book you might say. Yes, a recipebook for life, love, and art. However, my dear, let me tell you. Yes,there is no such thing. Every individual is unique in their own design,as intended by God himself. We classify, yes, always must we classify,for if not, then we would be lost, yes lost now wouldn't we?Classification, order, expectations, but alas, we forget. For what is art,if not the out word expression of an artist. It is the soul of the artisanand if his expectations are met, than who are we to judge whether hiswork be art or not?
— Cristina Marrero, The Unsung Love Story
Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.
— Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
Patience is a virtue Savannah, to tolerate delay. It implies self control and forbearance, as opposed to wanting what we want when we want it. Something to think about. . .Catherine Weaver (Character), "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
— Catherine Weaver
One wrong social move---say---like hanging with the wrong person,” she said nastily, “Can make your life around here a living nightmare and I definitely don’t think that you want that.
— T.L. Clarke, The Secret of the Scarlet Stone
Fiction: a game of pretend.
— Marty Rubin
Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend.
— Marty Rubin
histories of the world before our own. That was a world of empires, of corruption, of war-and more freedom than I've ever known. But the people of that time are gone, their dreams in ruin, existing only in smoke and ash.
— Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen
It is said that there is never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart. The shroud that covers this free spirit is woven by the complex threads of society.
— Swati Kumar, The Great Indian Dilemma
The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don't think so. And I don't think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
Too many words for one book--truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.
— David Benioff, City of Thieves
Some fictions become fixtures in the real city. Their stories are so powerful that they leap off the page on to the streets, irreversibly altering the place where they were set.
— Henry Eliot, Curiocity: In Pursuit of London
Xavier was like some sort of sex drug that numbed my mind and clouded it. He made me stupid.
— Kathey Gray, He Loves Me...
Popular! In America, what else matters?
— Joyce Carol Oates, My Sister, My Love
As a general rule, I surmise that most fictional stories are populated by misfits, changelings, and oddities, which is what makes the writing interesting and considered novel.
— Todd Crawshaw, Light-Years in the Dark: Storypoems
If you don't see something beautiful, change your viewpoint.
— Erin Entrada Kelly, You Go First
Charlotte made a promise to herself then and there: If I ever see someone fall, I'll ask if they're okay.
— Erin Entrada Kelly, You Go First
This isn’t fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.
— Ali Smith, Autumn
As if the jealousy of a lover could ever compete with the ferocity of a mother.
— Sarah A. Denzil
I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.
— Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words
Memory is like fiction: or else it's fiction that's like memory.
— Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
Memory is like fiction: or else it' fiction that's like memory.
— Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person's hand holding mine. There have been times where I felt that I might die of loneliness.
— Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
I shouldn't have even been obsessing about it anyway, he probably had a girlfriend. Like a supermodel or playboy bunny or something, someone equivalent to his level of sexiness. Not someone normal like me.
— Kathey Gray, Breaking Girl Code
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever lost.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn't count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
From my new WIP, Behind the Fan. “Come with me.” His breath is warm; his lips lightly touch her ear, it gives her a delicious tingle. This seduction is no accident.“Baby we can be anywhere, we will start new. Dottie, all I need is you.”She opens her eyes, he turns when he feels the flutter of her lashes. She expects another plea instead; he kisses her. Soft and slow his lips pulling her down deeper into a sweet chasm. This assault on her proprieties will be slow and subdued. He has after all proven that he is a patient man. Those musicians’ finger will trail on the column of her neck first. The touch is warm, soft nevertheless deliberate. Do the top buttons of her blouse come undone on their own accord or has he banished them? She is never sure but before she can register the affect, he lightly strokes the swell of her breast. It is sinful; no matter how often she confesses her weakness to the priest, she is never stronger. Her body willingly betrays her; she will roam her hands down his back, beyond the tapered waist to the hard orbs of his backside. She herself is no innocent, she revels in his plead for more. She is going to hell she wished she cared for her soul.“Honey leap with me, we will land safely I promise you.”“Oh God, Nicky you know it is never this simple.”Nick leans back enough to look into her eyes; she feels he can see damn near to her soul. She prays he will stay but knows her appeal is futile. He feels colder already, it does not matter how she tries to hold on he is already leaving. Leaving her behind.
— Caroline Walken
Conformity runs rampant through everyday life, and people want to read about characters that deviate from societal norms.
— Jonathan Heatt
Koto taka AC second class?
— Pritam Banikk, Two digit less love