imaginative literature Quotes

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.

I don't like to read nonfiction. To me, fact is something I can look up.

I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

There is a document in every novel in the world. Even in the most fantastic novel, even in science fiction, there is a documentary side. But, this side is not the crux of the matter.

Books do pretend ...but squeezed in between is even more that is true—without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?

All literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature...

Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.

Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been.

Some books make us dream, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written.

Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life.

Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.

I'm much more drawn to fiction, to short stories, and to plays, than I am to diarists.

Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

I want to write some books. Books that have nothing to do with music, just some fiction type of books for a whole different audience of people.

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.

The genres of the fantastic and the grotesque are far more interesting to me than most mnemonic fiction.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.