Fictional Story Quotes & Sayings

The two explorers are given fictional names. But as in real life, they travel to the Amazon roughly a generation apart, in the early-to-mid 20th century. In the film, they're both guided by Karamakate, as a young man early in the story and later as an old shaman. He and the outsiders share a desire for knowledge - self knowledge and an understanding of the world around them, says the film's co-screenwriter, Jacques Toulemonde. — Tom Cole

12/18/89 Calvin asks Hobbes if he'll help him write a book. Calvin says this book will be like historical fiction. He's writing a fictional autobiography. He tells Hobbes it's the story of his life with a lot of parts completely made up. Hobbes asks why he'd want to make up his whole life. Calvin replies that in his book, he has a flame thrower. — Steve Kurtz

Furthermore, it goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise, in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real. — Neil Gaiman

Truth and Truthfulness is an ambitious work, and its journeys into history give it a breadth unusual in these days of increased academic specialization ... William's book combines real history and fictional constructs to tell a revealing story that makes us reconsider the meaning of familiar concepts. — Julian Baggini

films like The Never-Ending Story (1984), Stranger than Fiction (2006), and The Adjustment Bureau (2011). Have you seen any of these films? Then you understand hermeneutics. In each case, the story revolves around a protagonist engaging his own life as a fictional story being written either in this world or in another, seemingly by someone else. As he reads and interprets the text of his life, however, he discovers that its story or plot changes. He discovers the circle or loop of hermeneutics. He discovers that as he engages his cultural script as text creatively and critically he is rereading and rewriting himself. He is changing the story. — Whitley Strieber

As a boy, I remember my father telling me a bedtime story about the day my grandfather was decapitated. — Justin Bienvenue

My fictional worlds were those of a fabulist, of an intellectual fantasist. I was the lawgiver, and the countries and inhabitants of my imagination were answerable to me. If I wished for a man to levitate; to enter another's story by rowboat or by intoning a sentence or by performing a shadow-puppet play; if I wanted him to become a swarm of intelligent elementary particles and enter the Internet and travel into the past and far into the future, it was so. — Norman Lock

It is perhaps both a blessing and a curse that fictional worlds spring into my mind nearly fully formed and it takes quite a while to sift through everything to find the story. — Erin Morgenstern

For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional. — Aimee Mann

Tethered to the universe by tendrils of history, with threads of continuity descending to God knows where, I see that I'm more than the dust I'll become."
This quote is from my novel, "Whispers from St. Mary's Well." Many readers have said that, like the fictional narrator of the story, Carrie Rose Stillwell, they felt a deep connection to the universe through past, present, and future experiences, after reading the story of a child who communicates with future generations. — Carol Kenny

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain. — Meryl Streep

I don't know who he was," Kavita flat-out states, "but whoever he was he sure did a number on you, didn't he?"
Mary leans forward to ensure he would see her deviant stare. "Did it ever occur to you that maybe I did a number on him?"
Kavita leans in closer as well, and with that same deviant expression, "Yes. I have. — Carroll Bryant

Finally, our new brain needs a purpose. A purpose is expressed as a series of goals. In the case of our biological brains, our goals are established by the pleasure and fear centers that we have inherited from the old brain. These primitive drives were initially set by biological evolution to foster the survival of species, but the neocortex has enabled us to sublimate them. Watson's goal was to respond to Jeopardy! queries. Another simply stated goal could be to pass the Turing test. To do so, a digital brain would need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human. It would also have to dumb itself down considerably, for any system that displayed the knowledge of, say, Watson would be quickly unmasked as nonbiological. — Ray Kurzweil

What all that means is that readers fundamentally want to feel something, not about your story, but about themselves. They want to play. They want to anticipate, guess, think, and judge. They want to finish a story and feel competent. They want to feel like they've been through something. They want to connect with your characters and live their fictional experience, or believe that they have. Creating — Donald Maass

every fictional world was a work of fantasy, and whenever writers introduce a threat or a conflict into their story, they create the possibility of horror. He had been drawn to horror fiction, he said, because it took the most basic elements of literature and pushed them to their extremes. All fiction was make-believe, which made fantasy more valid (and honest) than realism. He — Joe Hill

We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first. — Lisa Zunshine

Owen is Owen. No one gets to tell him how to live his life. Not you, not me, and not some author nobody. Owen gets to choose how his life story goes, and no one, let alone his idiot fictional self, gets to take that away from him. — James Riley

The biggest problem in the fictional treatment of sex is that it's not treated as part of the story but as a pause from the story. The best sex scenes in fiction are the ones that advance the story. — K.M. Soehnlein

Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional
to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death. — Kate Summerscale

I'm here to take him into custody and deliver him to the Council. (Celena)
Well, that sucks. Bank robbery, handing out the passwords for the Dark-Hunter Web site, carjacking, mugging, cats mixing with dogs, and now this ... writing a short story. High crimes all. You get the rope and we'll hang him for it. God forbid the whole twelve subscribers of that magazine should actually read a fictional story and think it real. (Rafael) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore. — Jason Isbell

I don't really distinguish between a fictional hero and a real life hero as a basis for any comparison. To me, a hero is a hero. I like making pictures about people who have a personal mission in life or at least in the life of a story who start out with certain low expectations and then over achieve our highest expectations for them. That's the kind of character arc I love dabbling in as a director, as a filmmaker. — Steven Spielberg

I read the paper every day. There are certain subjects that will catch my attention. I have an entire file of articles. Of course I make up the story, especially since most criminals are not very smart and fictional crime must be clever. I have to make sure the story I am telling is interesting and realistic. In this book I went on line and found out the manners of codes. I thought it interesting to use them as a jumping off point. — Sue Grafton

It was a fictional story, but like any good fiction, without the need to adjust or conceal the truth, it actually might be
the greatest expression of truth. — Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Neither is a memoir the same as a biography, which aims for the most objective, factual account of a life. A memoir, as I understand it, makes no pretense of denying its subjectivity. Its matter is one person's memory, and memory by nature is selective and colored by emotion. Others who participated in the events I describe will no doubt remember some details differently, though I hope we would agree on the essential truths. I have taken no liberties with the past as I remember it, used no fictional devices beyond reconstructing conversations from memory. I have not blended characters, or bent chronology to convenience. And yet I have tried to tell a good story. — Sonia Sotomayor

There is a long-standing trend of documented trend of UFO appearances and these appearances have led to a fascinating worldwide yet still unsolved enigma. 'Disclosure: The Future is Now' takes a close non-fictional look at the history of UFO sightings and related areas such as alien abductions.and alleged government conspiracies. Disclosure is also a science fiction story of how events in the future may return to affect the Earth at the present time. 'Release From Stasis' is a fictional sequel to the first book's story. — Graham Clingbine

The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.
The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end. — Vera Nazarian

Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures ... The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80 — Jacques Bonnet

2D looks so flat. Well, it is, of course, it's flat. But 3D isn't. And for an adventure story that takes you into a long-distant, fictional world, it's ideal, I think. — Ian McKellen

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you. — Jeffrey Eugenides

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened. — John Irving

A plot, I used to remind my students, is not merely a sequence of events: "A" followed by "B" followed by "C" followed by "D." Rather, it's a series of events linked by cause and effect: "A" causes "B," which causes "C," and so on. True, a person's (or a fictional character's) destiny may be more than the sum of his choices
fate and luck play a role as well
but only scientists (and not all of them) believe that free will is a sham. People in life
and therefore in fiction
must choose, and their choices must have meaningful consequences. Otherwise, there's no story. — Richard Russo

Meaning, yes
I don't really exist except on the page or in the back of your brain. But if you think it's weird a fictional character's telling this story, you ain't seen what happened, yet. — Kyle Michel Sullivan

Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell. — Lily King

The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work. — Bruce Chatwin

It seems natural to surround my fictional world with animals because my reality is full of them. When I'm sitting there conceiving a story, they just pop up. — Sara Gruen

We need creative license with the fictional narratives that become our memories. Anthologized, these are the tales that become the story of your life. — Danielle Ganek

One of the things that makes characters real is details. Life offers a lot of details. You just have to choose and use them wisely. When you give them to fictional people and a fictional story, their purpose and their meaning changes, so it's best to see the version in the book as fiction entirely, wherever it started out. — Nick Earls

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream. — Steven Erikson

I love to have real people of history interact with my fictional characters. History gives me the plot. I research the period meticulously, and then I blend in a romantic and sensual love story to give it balance. The heavier the history, the more romantic the couple must be. — Virginia Henley

Mary approaches her before she is able to reach her station. "Hello Lily. Get anything special for Christmas?"
"Just the usual." She answers. "Shattered dreams. — Carroll Bryant

I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing 'Cum Laude.' So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby ... but the students and cast of characters are fictional. — Cecily Von Ziegesar

Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting. — Norman Lock

although we move forward through a story, the entire story is already complete - we hold it in our hands. In this sense, fiction, the great life-giver, also kills, not just because people often die in novels and stories but, more important, because, even if they don't die, they have already happened. Fictional form is always a kind of death, in the way that Blanchot described actual life. "Was. We say he is, then suddenly he was, this terrible was." That is the narrator of Thomas Bernhard's novel "The Loser," describing his friend Wertheimer, who has committed suicide. But it might also describe the tense in which we encounter most fictional lives: we say, "She was," not "She is." He left the house, she rubbed her neck, she put down her book and went to sleep. — James Wood

This is a work of fiction. Still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible worlds is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe, it's not as fictional as we think. — Neil Gaiman

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

All the characters in this book are fictional, but they are as real to me as the members of my own family. I had to tell their story because they could not. — Maral Boyadjian

My job (and yours, if you decide this is a viable approach to storytelling) is to make sure these fictional folks behave in ways that will both help the story and seem reasonable to us, given what we know about them (and what we know about real life, of course). — Stephen King

This isn't your world. It's your parents. Your world is still out there, waiting to be discovered. Always remember that. — Carroll Bryant

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history. — Edward Rutherfurd

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration. — Adam Johnson

I don't like the word 'autobiography.' I rather like the term 'autofiction.' The second you make a script out of the story of your life, it becomes fictional. Of course, the truth is never far. But the story is created out of it. — Marjane Satrapi

So. If this was some normal fictional young-adult book, this is the part of the story where after the film, the entire high school would rise to their feet and applaud, and Earl and I would find True Acceptance and begin to Truly Believe in Ourselves and Rachel would somehow miraculously make a recovery, or maybe she would die but we would Always Have Her to Thank for Making Us Discover Our Inner Talent, and Madison would become my girlfriend and I would get to nuzzle her boobs like an affectionate panda cub whenever I wanted.
That is why fiction sucks. None of that happened. Instead, pretty much everything happened that I was afraid of, except worse. — Jesse Andrews

The proverb, "Where there's a will.." sums it up for a writer who had just started in his writing life; for himself, the fictional characters and the audience of his works. It's a trinity of perspectives; one of his struggle, another of the story character which he writes about and the last one of the reader's expectation of his protagonists. — Lucas Michael

The characters tell their story - I am merely the tool used to record it — Marti Melville

There is no valid reason for the perennial Christian preference of biography, history, and the newspaper to fiction and poetry. The former tell us what happened, while literature tells us what happens. The example of the Bible, which is central to any attempt to formulate a Christian approach to literature, sanctions the imagination as a valid form of truth. The Bible is in large part a work of imagination. Its most customary way of expressing truth is not the sermon or the theological outline, but the story, the poem, and the vision
all of them literary forms and products of the imagination (though not necessarily the fictional imagination). Literary conventions are present in the Bible from start to finish, even in the most historically factual parts. — Leland Ryken

Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you're a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify. — Peter Landesman

Storytelling began as a way for humans to relay information, from where to find food sources to the benefits of familial bonding, because fictional stories were the easiest way to memorize and communicate a complete set of information. We remember information best when it is delivered in the form of a plot, which is called 'semantic memory.' Stories still serve a definitive purpose and the stronger the purpose, the clearer the story.

Fire Up Your Writing Brain — Susan Reynolds