51 Fiction Quotes

Fiction has an unparalleled ability to transport us to worlds known and unknown, to introduce us to characters who become companions, and to encapsulate emotions in ways that resonate deeply within our hearts. Within the pages of countless novels lie words that have the power to inspire, provoke thought, and even change our perspectives. Whether it's a single line that captures the essence of a story, or a profound statement that lingers long after the book is closed, fiction quotes have a unique way of staying with us. In this post, we bring you a curated collection of the top 51 fiction quotes that have left their mark on readers around the globe. Dive in and let these words reignite your love for the imaginative and transformative power of fiction.

1. “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” - Jessamyn West

2. “Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,How much would novels gain by the exchange!How differently the world would men behold!” - George Gordon Byron

3. “The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.” - Todd Strasser

4. “There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.” - Flannery O'Connor

5. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” - Oscar Wilde

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.” - Flannery O'Connor

10. “A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.” - Diane Setterfield

11. “Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.” - Jasper Fforde

12. “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

13. “Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.” - Joyce Carol Oates

14. “Imagination is a gift. Don't waste it!” - Jeanne Warnes

15. “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” - Doris May Lessing

16. “I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.” - Wilkie Collins

17. “Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.” - David Foster Wallace

18. “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

19. “Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own “real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.” - Leonard S. Marcus

20. “A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.” - Tim O'Brien

21. “A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.” - Tim O'Brien

22. “Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.” - Benjamin Disraeli

23. “The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...” - Bruno Bettelheim

24. “They weren't true stories; they were better than that.” - Alice Hoffman

25. “Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.” - Herman Wouk

26. “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.” - Orson Scott Card

27. “Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.” - Douglas Adams

28. “The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works out in the end. They'll beat the bad guys and put things right and everything ends up cool.In real life, vacuum cleaners kill spiders. If you cross a busy road without looking, you get whacked by a car. If you fall from a tree, you break some bones. Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins. I just wanted to make that clear before I begun.” - Darren Shan

29. “The best fiction is true.” - Kinky Friedman

30. “A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.” - Isaac Babel

31. “Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life” - Martin Amis

32. “if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.” - Norton Juster

33. “Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.” - Mary Ann Shaffer

34. “Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.” - Virginia Woolf

35. “History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.” - Victor Hugo

36. “It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.” - Leland Ryken

37. “For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.” - George Gordon Byron

38. “But wishes are only granted in fairy tales.” - Simone Elkeles

39. “You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.” - John Waters

40. “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]” - David Foster Wallace

41. “T.G.T.B.T: too good to be true.” - Madonna

42. “I love fictional characters...they can't break your heart.” - Julia Hall

43. “...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.” - Rebecca Makkai

44. “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

45. “Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.” - Raymond A. Mar

46. “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” - David Foster Wallace

47. “Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.” - C. JoyBell C.

48. “Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.” - John Green

49. “There were no absolutes in fiction, no certain way to deliver what was needed. So it was no surprise most technical writers considered novel-writing a gateway to madness.” - S.A. Reid

50. “There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.” - Neil Gaiman

51. “A related question is where in time to begin. Should you begin far back in a character's past and move forward, or should you begin in the present and make use of flashbacks only where necessary? ... If the material with which you want to open the story is from the character's deep past, then there has to be an important relationship between what has happened in the past and what is about to happen. In other words, is the material with which you open the story an arrow pointing toward the unified effect?” - Julie Checkoway