93 Fiction Quotes

In the world of literature, fiction serves as a realm where imagination knows no bounds, emotions run deep, and stories enchant readers across the globe. With countless characters, plots, and settings that have captivated us through the ages, the wisdom and wit found in fiction often linger in our minds long after we've turned the last page. In this collection, we've gathered the top 93 fiction quotes that distill the essence of these timeless tales, offering a glimpse into the profound insights and unforgettable moments penned by some of the greatest authors of all time. Whether you seek inspiration, reflection, or simply a taste of literary brilliance, these quotes promise to transport you to worlds both familiar and fantastical.

1. “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.” - Flannery O'Connor

2. “You wanted us all back together again!" Bonnie shouted at Caroline, and pulled the scandalized girl into the dance. Meredith, her dignity forgotten, joined them too. And for a long time in the clearing there was only rejoicing.” - L.J. Smith

3. “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

4. “But I couldn't help myself, couldn't help the way I felt as I recalled the bliss and rush of a vampire's bite.” - Richelle Mead

5. “But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]” - T.C. Boyle

6. “Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.” - Sarah Dessen

7. “Rogerson," I asked him sweetly as we sat watching a video in the pool house, "where would I find the pelagic zone?""In the open sea," he said. "Now shut up and eat your Junior Mints.” - Sarah Dessen

8. “Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

9. “We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.” - Stanisław Lem

10. “I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something smarter. At last I concluded it would be a waste of labour. "Doubtless," though I, "she is some stiff old maid ; for though the daughter of Madame Reuter, she may well number upwards of forty winters; besides, if it were otherwise, if she be both young and pretty, I am not handsome, and no dressing can make me so, therefore I'll go as I am." And off I started, cursorily glancing sideways as I passed the toilet-table, surmounted by a looking-glass: a thin irregular face I saw, with sunk, dark eyes under a large, square forehead, complexion destitute of bloom or attraction; something young, but not youthful, no object to win a lady's love, no butt for the shafts of Cupid.” - Charlotte Brontë

11. “General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.” - Marvin Minsky

12. “Going for it and changing what you could change-that's what success was all about.” - Julie Garwood

13. “It did not seem odd to Max that what he had imagined about Stumps was really true, because this was exactly how games you made up worked. Of course they were true. In your mind.” - Pauline Clarke

14. “The Worst thing that Good could do to Evil was ignore it...” - Michael K. Bialys

15. “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

16. “Sometimes you wake up from a dream. Sometimes you wake up in a dream. And sometimes, every once in a while, you wake up in someone else's dream. ” - Richelle Mead

17. “Longing surged up within me. I wanted it. Oh God, I wanted it. I didn't want to hear Jerome chastise me for my "all lowlifes, all the time" seduction policy. I wanted to come home and tell someone about my day. I wanted to go out dancing on the weekends. I wanted to take vacations together. I wanted someone to hold me when I was upset, when the ups and downs of the world pushed me too far. I wanted someone to love. ” - Richelle Mead

18. “Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won’t? - Damon” - L.J. Smith

19. “And just then Damon stepped out of the coat closet, and at the same time Aunt Maggie tripped him neatly and said, “Bathroom door beside you,” and picked up a vase and hit the rising Damon over the head with it. Hard.” - L.J. Smith

20. “Perhaps it is our obligation to be noble before it is our obligation to be happy.” - Kathleen McGowan

21. “The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.” - William Gibson

22. “When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.But you’re not dead. I suppose the question must be, are you good?” - Karen Chance

23. “If I'd had enough breath, I would have screamed, both at the sensation and at the sheer pettiness of the bastard who wouldn't allow me even a tiny chance of escape.” - Karen Chance

24. “It hurt, remembering. Hurt because there was so much I'd done, so much I'd yet to do. In so many different ways, I now realized, not remembering had been a blessing. A brief respite in the twisted bloody mess that my life had become.But at least I knew who I was.” - Keri Arthur

25. “By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.” - Cormac McCarthy

26. “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

27. “Jenks enthusiastically leaned against the counter and opened the box. Bypassing the plastic knife, he broke off about a third of it and took a huge bite. Ivy watched, appalled, and I shrugged. His mouth moving as he hummed, Jenks finished unpacking the sacks. I was half dead, Ivy was whoring herself to keep me safe, but Jenks was okay as long as he had chocolate.” - Kim Harrison

28. “You had this all planned, didn’t you?' I accused. 'Thought you could come in here and seduce me like you do everyone else?' It wasn’t as if I could be angry, lying atop him as I was, but I tried.” - Kim Harrison

29. “His right ear still held both studs, and I wondered who had the missing earring. I would have asked, but was afraid he’d tell me Ivy had it.” - Kim Harrison

30. “Big lots,' I said, seeing the eighty-year-old oaks and shady lawns. The houses were set way back and had iron fences and stone drives. The harder to hear your neighbors scream, my dear,' was David’s answer, and I sent my head up and down in agreement.” - Kim Harrison

31. “Grimes believed in what he did, with no doubts. Though he was older than me by over a decade, I suddenly felt old. Some things mark your soul, not in years but in blood and pain and selling off parts of yourself to get the bad guys, until you finally look in the mirror and aren’t sure which side you’re on anymore. There comes a point when having a badge doesn’t make you the good guy, it just makes you one of the guys. I needed to be one of the good guys, or what the hell was I doing?” - Laurell K. Hamilton

32. “Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.” - Paullina Simons

33. “Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.” - Frederic Raphael

34. “I am serving the purpose for which I was designed, therefore I am satisfied with my existence.” - Kevin J. Anderson

35. “Gordon Edgley's sudden death came as a shock to everyone - not least himself. One moment he was in his study, seven words into the twenty-fifth sentence of the final chapter of his new book, And the Darkness Rained upon Them, and the next he was dead. A tragic loss, his mind echoed numbly as he slipped away.” - Derek Landy

36. “It kept him alive, he was certain; even more, it kept his darkest of his demons at bay.” - Lara Adrian

37. “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

38. “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

39. “The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.” - Stephen Leacock

40. “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.” - Jorge Luis Borges

41. “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

42. “This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God.” - Julian Barnes

43. “Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?''For fun?''Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.” - John Fowles

44. “I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley

45. “Writing a novel is agony.” - George Orwell

46. “The Witcher had a knife to his throat. He was wallowing in a wooden tub, brimfull with soapsuds, his head thrown agains the slippery rim. The bitter taste of soap lingered in his mouth as the knife, blunt as a doorknob, scraped his Adam's apple painfully and moved towards his chin with a grating sound.” - Andrzej Sapkowski

47. “There was no control except the "mood of his power... and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play someplace where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes-- then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Boldon broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under the sweat of his head.” - Michael Ondaatje

48. “We both must burn this midnight oil together. You’re just as new to me as I am you.” --Andrew” - Laura Kreitzer

49. “Stacy smiled proudly and he filed the image of her sweet face in the section of his heart he shared with no one else ~ Brian, Song of the Snowman"Mom said if you put ears on your snowman, he’ll hear the music of the angels and sing songs to you.” ~ Stacy, Song of the SnowmanThe sweet promise of her embrace cured the loneliness in him. In her arms, he was whole. ~ Brian, Song of the Snowman He composed music, dreamed of the future, and kept the situations he couldn’t change at bay to the rhythm of his feet drumming on the concrete. Brian, Song of the SnowmanThis was as simple as his life got  rhythm, rhyme, and fingertips on cool keys. ~ Brian, Song of the Snowman” - Rhonda Tibbs

50. “Well, the only reason we’re friends is because you can rock a tweed suit,” she informed, tone mock serious. “So if you want to keep me around, I expect more tweed.” - Laura Kreitzer

51. “I tapped around on my new Miracle Phone—a gift from Joseph—as I listened to the discussion about our next move. I wasn’t trying to be rude, but I’d recently become addicted to this one game on my Miracle Phone. Really, I was listening. I could multitask like no other. Trust me, there’s an app for that.” - Laura Kreitzer

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

53. “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

54. “Some things are just like riding a bicycle; you jump on, pedal, and hope you don’t fall.” - Henry Mosquera

55. “We'd become Japs, Jews, Niggers. We weren't before.” - HM Naqvi

56. “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

57. “I stare at him. "You can't risk not winning. Not because of me." Sean doesn't lift his eyes from the counter. "We make our move when you make yours. You on the inside, me on the outside. Corr can come from the middle of the pack; he's done it before. It's one side you won't have to worry about." I say, "I will not be your weakness, Sean Kendrick." Now he looks at me. He says, very softly, "It's late for that, Puck.” - Maggie Stiefvater

58. “Hey, I write fiction. I just make this stuff up, unless I get my hands on some good juicy truth. You know the kind I'm talking about ... that stranger-than variety.” - Dick Peterson

59. “Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.” - James van Pelt

60. “Matt was almost completely naked. A tattered loincloth and an ugly chain with a yellow diamond were his only apparel.” - Priya Ardis

61. “Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.” - Sharon Salzberg

62. “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

63. “Some justice, though did not deal with kindheartedness or good feeling toward others. No, justice had a darker side, a gray area where it mingled alongside vengeance, and only the wise and pure of heart were able to tell the two apart. That kind of justice was swift. It was only called upon afer mercy and morals fail. It was the darkest form of goodness known to anyone, even the gods, and required only the strongest, most daring men to bring about.” - Evan Meekins

64. “He is a free man, not because is in a poition of political power and influence that you will never be able to achieve, and not because he has more character and heart in his fingertip than you have in your entire being, but because he is a man, and is thus entitled to be free.” - Evan Meekins

65. “the illusion that power lies within the hands of the common man is more important than legitimate efficiency within the government.” - Evan Meekins

66. “Woe is the mind of the common man, so easily controlled by the prospect of an ambition never to be truly attained. This is what tyrants live on and by what commoners are blissfully burdened and subdued.” - Evan Meekins

67. “Hate did not give way to heroism.” - Evan Meekins

68. “If the world explore all my dark fantasy, will change for the better”.” - Alexandar Tomov

69. “No–one believes they’re a hero. But that doesn’t mean they’re not heroic - Captain Spectre.” - Kevin Outlaw

70. “One of the West's singular migrations--from the Azores to California's Great Central Valley--is given faces and voices in Anthony Barcellos's new novel, Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read...” - Gerald Haslam

71. “The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.” - Cornell Woolrich

72. “Let Your Inhibitions Run Free” - Cindy Smith-Jordan

73. “¡Dios bendiga los tiempos antiguos, en que existían cosas raras...!” - Knut Hamsun

74. “There is no neatness in any life- great or small. It is only an illusion men foolishly pursue. All lived lives are a mess.The neatness in my life had begun to crumble some time before, but now it disintegrated completely as I vanished into a world of endlessly opening doors, teasing riddles and lives without boundaries.For the first time I began to understand how shallow neatness is. How cramping, how limiting.For the first time I understood neat lives are comatose lives. (the Alchemy of Desire 304)” - Tarun J. Tejpal

75. “...we haven't had any accidents for months now...Everything on that island is perfectly fine.” - Michael Crichton

76. “He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again. I pictured smacking him in the face.” - Priya Ardis

77. “If this is where you ask me to run around in my birthday suit, I’m not entirely comfortable with that,” I said, smirking.” - Laura Kreitzer

78. “Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.” - Junot Diaz

79. “The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.” - Oakley Hall

80. “Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.” - David Foster Wallace

81. “There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We’re just warming up.” - Chuck Palahniuk

82. “What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine.” - Gregory Maguire

83. “If he's like any other man I've ever met, it's not my smile he's going to be looking at.” - Brad Thor

84. “No matter how hard you try to create a story that's completely fictional, parts of your own experience are bound to surface.” - Hiroshi Ishizaki

85. “Jack gave her a fierce look. “Your mother gave up the best thing she had in her life. I know you miss her, I know you’re confused and have all sorts of questions for her. But you’re better than her, Lola, you’re better than all of this. “She wronged you, not the other way around. You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t deserve what happened to you. She’s the one that needs to feel bad, not you. “Sometimes there are no answers. You have to accept that. Maybe you’ll never know what you think you need to know, but do you really need to know all the details, really? You know she wasn’t there when you needed her, she still isn’t here when you need her, but look around, Lola.” Jack opened his arms wide. “You got me. You got your aunt. Jared. Sebastian. Rachel. Even Isabelle. “You need to realize that and move on, as best you can. I had to realize that myself. When you let go of the pain and hurt and unanswered questions, Lola, then you’ll be okay. You’re safe now.” Jack pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You’re safe now. Remember that. Believe that.” - Lindy Zart

86. “Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh.” - David Foster Wallace

87. “It took me several minutes to persuade myself to watch the news. During which time I gave myself a stern talking to. That turned into me considering a local pub that would be the perfect place to drown my sorrows in a barrel of tequila, though after much introspection, I scratched the idea just to avoid needless drunken embarrassment. Then, admittedly, I contemplated pouncing Andrew for another steamy romp session. Despite its proven potency to assuage stress and tension, I decided now was not the time to indulge in explosive sexcapades.” - Laura Kreitzer

88. “Fantasy leaves imaginations larger than it finds them.” - Brandon Mull

89. “What are you doing with all these books?" I asked, stepping towards a tall stack on the floor. I ran my fingers down the spines, recognizing a few familiar titles from School: Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, and To the Lighthouse.Caleb came beside me, his warm shoulder brushing against mine. "I do this funny thing sometimes," she said, shooting me a mischievous grin. "I open a book, and I look at each page. It's called reading” - Anna Carey

90. “We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.” - John Dufresne

91. “We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them.” - Shane Koyczan

92. “From Flood, Flash, and Pheromones--coming soon:In the torrential downpour with water swirling that threatened to pull her down, she didn’t see the voice’s owner. The hurricane had blessed the entire city with a surprise drenching. All weather reports had predicted it to pass over with sporadic rainfall but that didn’t happen. The storm settled over Houston as if it had no intention to move on. Cassie flailed in panic as the roof of her car disappeared under the water twenty feet beyond. She prayed once more that the container in it was watertight. And that she’d see her car again. Then she concentrated on living. Where had the voice come from?” - Shelley K. Wall

93. “Literature is the real life of imaginary people.” - Stefanos Livos