40 Insightful Quotes About Fiction from Famous Writers-Storytellers!

A work of fiction, in writing or otherwise, is a creative concoction of characters, settings and scenarios which are all, but only illusory formations carved by the function of human mind called as ‘imagination’. Yet for most humans, storytelling forms the make-up of majority of our life’s time.

Stories!

These fabricated vistas, slapped with wodges of tremors, trepidations and sensations; trammeling with shams of ideas and waves of emotion lapping through…Stories are those quirks of tricks and lies, in the backdrop of which, lurks a still quietude of the emotional center that hums and rustles in the heartbeats of its truest readers and listeners.

Discover below, a collection dazzling with forty insightful quotations from some of the greatest writers-storytellers, on the topic of ‘fiction’. To read all of these in one go (with background music!) begin straight from the following video, or skip through this to read them one by one. Yowzers!

#1 Fiction is the truth inside the lie. – Stephen King

#2 Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't. – Neil Gaiman

#3 Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth. – Khaled Hosseini

#4 When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction. – Steven Wright

#5 Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

#6 What I’m looking for is nothing but a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck into a good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off. That sense of reality is important in any work of fiction, but I think it is particularly important in a story dealing with the abnormal or paranormal. – Stephen King

#7 Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. – Albert Camus

#8 The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. - Tom Clancy

#9 This moment will just be another story someday. – Stephen Chbosky

#10 After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. – Philip Pullman

#11 The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. - Muriel Rukeyser

#12 The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. – Jean Jacques Rousseau

#13 Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible. - Francis Bacon

#14 Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. ― Arthur Conan Doyle

#15 There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth. ― Doris May Lessing

#16 Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.” ― Patrick Ness

#17 Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream. ― John Cheever

#18 Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. ― Hilary Mantel

#19 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

#20 Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. – Haruki Murakami

#21 Fiction is the truth, fool! – John Waters

#22 A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth. ― Diane Setterfield

#23 Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. ― David Foster Wallace

#24 Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. ― Virginia Woolf

#25 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 García Márquez

#26 If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. ― Richard Bach

#27 The point of stories is not that they are objectively true, but that the soul of the story is truer than reality. Those who mock fiction do so because they fear the truth. ― Cassandra Clare

#28 Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different. – Neil Gaiman

#29 Escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real. – Neil Gaiman

#30 I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time. ― Diane Setterfield

#31 Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too. ― Nicole Christie

#32 Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. ― Michael Scott

#33 As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency. ― Slavoj Žižek