Fiction Influence Quotes

Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

I read way, way more Andre Norton than could possibly have been healthy. It was a short hop from her to the rest of the library's science fictional and fantastic holdings.

Space opera was the sort of story on which I grew up. When I was younger, I read heavily in pulp magazines. They were readily available in the stores.

Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.

Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.

When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction."

Speaking for myself, I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

I've always been inspired by Don Quixote as a role model of sorts, of the power of books to sort of make you insane in maybe a beautiful way.

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

It's not at all a far jump to think that overall perceptions of gender - and what is and is not important in gender roles - would carry over from life to fiction.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

When I was growing up, if there was a Young Adult section of my town's library, I missed it. I wandered right from 'The Babysitter's Club' over to Stephen King. His books were big and fat and they seemed important. I eventually worked my way through most of the shelf, but 'It' is the one that stuck with me.