Fiction Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old fiction quotes, fiction sayings, and fiction proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. Mark Twain
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself. Jim Rohn
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life. Henry Miller
Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world. Don DeLillo
Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. Oscar Wilde
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it. Hunter S. Thompson
Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly. Alice Walker
Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. John Updike
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. Virginia Woolf
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. Paul Theroux
Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything. Arundhati Roy
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being. David Foster Wallace
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. Jessamyn West
Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists. Stephen King
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. Tim O'Brien
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth. Doris Lessing
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future. Jean Baudrillard
Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. David Foster Wallace
Good fiction creates its own reality. Nora Roberts
The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there. Charlaine Harris
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. Ralph Ellison
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out. Clive James
Fiction is not a dream. Nor is it guesswork. It is imagining based on facts, and the facts must be accurate or the work of imagining will not stand up. Margaret Culkin Banning
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life. W. Somerset Maugham
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. John Cheever
Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds. Rick Bass
A mans face is his autobiography. A women's face is her work of fiction. Oscar Wilde
Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction. William Blake
Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet. Willa Cather
No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first. Friedrich Nietzsche
Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds. Bonnie Friedman
Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere. Jasper Fforde
I didn’t lie! I just created fiction with my mouth! Homer
The truer the facts the better the fiction. Virginia Woolf
Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring. Charlaine Harris
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly. Jonathan Safran Foer
If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction? J. M. Coetzee