George Sand Quotes

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

In a film, you have to externalize things that are internal and of course it becomes a debate about to what extent you do that.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

Truth is so much more interesting than the fiction we're used to.

Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.

I like going back and writing fiction.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

Before you can read, you know the difference between a story and reality. And, of course, by the time you're old enough to do any real damage with an Uzi, you've learned that difference.

Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

The fact is fiction is always a representation of life, sometimes the lives of famous people.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

For 'Gender Studies,' I wrote that story in May and June of 2016. People have said to me, 'Oh, it's a political allegory,' and I think, 'Sure.' The political stuff is definitely there. But that's why I like fiction; there can be lots of different things going on, and it's all intertwined, and you can't separate out what's in what category.

When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.

Reality, by itself, becomes a story by Philip K. Dick.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.