Quotes & Sayings About Metafiction

Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn't it like taking a bite of something lovely? If only we could eat words. — Sol Luckman

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. — David Foster Wallace

Suppose that which is taking place here and now is not reality, but only a tale, a tale of some higher order that contains within it the tale of the machine: a reader might well wonder why you and your companions are shaped like spheres, inasmuch as that sphericality serves no purpose in the narration and would appear to be a wholly superfluous embellishment ... — Stanislaw Lem

One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea - but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? — George Eliot

Metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is the only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love, a night-light on the black fifth wall of being a subject, a face in a crowd. It's lovers not being lovers. Kissing their own spine. Fucking themselves. True, there are some gifted old contortionists out there. Ambrose and Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme can fuck themselves awfully well. — David Foster Wallace

Murder, other than in the most strict forensic sense, is never soluble. That dark human clot can never melt into a lucid, clear suspension. Our detective fiction tells us otherwise: everything is just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive and a means, and you have solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce the complex events. — Alan Moore

How is your father?" she asks disinterestedly.
"A contrivance," I mutter. "A plot device. — Bret Easton Ellis

Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world. — Alan Moore

Conchpore is real. It is as real as Malgudi, Brahmpur, Lilliput or Macondo. And also as real as San Francisco, Madurai, Edinburgh, Gaborone or Tokyo. You know that fictional towns exist. You visit them all the time. — Indu Muralidharan

Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional. — Robert Coover

Two whores who finally found something to mother. A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it From Hair To Maternity. It would probly be a very long book. Whores did not produce as fast as rabbits. — James Jones

Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'
A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'
You enjoy this duty?'
He nodded.
I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here. — Roger Zelazny

Apparently, faith in life is one thing and faith in literature is another. — Gerald Weaver

Up near the top, underlined and in capitals were the words: 'READ THIS.'
Jay grimaced as she wondered what she was in for. Would it be a semi-literate political rant, a half-baked conspiracy theory or a quasi-religious manifesto? Perhaps it was just a very long suicide note: a self-pitying list of misfortune and hardship. Whatever it was she doubted it would contain anything useful.
Unable to put it off any longer, she finished her coffee and began: 'We are all stories that we tell ourselves, memories selected to fit our chosen form.
What becomes of us when there is no-one there to read? — K. Valisumbra

Real life is generally very haphazard in its plotting, and I think a lot of people lament that, and turn to fiction to briefly experience, albeit vicariously, a more satisfying sort of reality. We want to see *sense*
not necessarily happy endings, but effectual actions and significant outcomes. (Postmodern fiction and metafiction, I gather, aim to call attention to the falsity of these things, which is like selling liquor that perversely makes you more sober). — Tim Powers

For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemisis, Realism: if realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see. — David Foster Wallace

The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception. — Ashim Shanker

A story always ends just when it comes to an end. Like a breath. — Leonie Swann

The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was. — Sol Luckman

It was one of those perfect Autumn days so common in stories and rare in the real world. — Patrick Rothfuss

But every time we read a new version of the Arthurian legend, we must compare, contrast, and recreate our image of the characters: each new version is, in a sense, metafiction — Ann F. Howey

The problem with thinking up a new and original idea within a novel is that you have to make sure that Kurt Vonnegut did not already think of it. — Meena Kandasamy

I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever. — Ben Lerner

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two. — Ian McEwan

His voice just stops, exactly like when the needle is lifted from a phonograph record by the hand of someone who is not listening to the record. [ ... ] She speaks the same dead, level tone: two bodiless voices in monotonous strophe and anistrophe: to bodiless voices recounting dreamily something performed in a region without dimension by people without blood [ ... ] Two of them are also motionless, the woman with that stonevisaged patience of a waiting rock, the old man with a spent quality like the charred wick of a candle from which the flame has been violently blown away. — William Faulkner

Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I'm not lonely, if that's what it seems like. Always writing things down. — Chris Campanioni

He decided to re-read his story from the beginning. As he read he felt as if he was falling forwards into the blank, white spaces of the screen, and the words faded from his consciousness to be replaced completely by the things that they described. — K. Valisumbra

I hear her slip into bed with him, and I hear everything that happens after that. Sex is such a strange and sloppy business, why bother to recount every slurp and moan that ensued? Tom and Honey deserve their privacy, and for that reason I will end my report of the night's activities here. If some readers object, I ask them to close their eyes and use their imaginations. — Paul Auster

But there was a catalyst, an event, a moment which changed everything and not just for us. This is good for storytelling but bad for decision making, and it is frightening to look back and realize, were it not for that moment, all of our lives would have been so different. maybe that's revisionist history. Maybe it's me making origin myths. But I can't shake the conviction that Jason's boyfriend's friend's ex-boyfriend's girlfriend changed the world. — Laurie Frankel

It is the ultimate metafictional act, not homicide but suicide. (Wallace would say that one of the problems of metafiction is that there is no difference.) — D.T. Max