Value Of Fiction Quotes & Sayings

The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy's writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel's world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject. — Geoffrey Harvey

I am convinced that if stories such as these have any lasting value, it is in revealing the kind of work young pulp-writers were doing in those days when rates were low and one had to make a typewriter smoke in order to keep eating. — Hugh B. Cave

Empathy. Carlin always said it was the great value of fiction, to put us inside the minds of strangers. Lazarus, — Erika Johansen

The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that's really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being-that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal. — David Foster Wallace

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. — John Updike

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy. — Alexander Theroux

I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values. — Milan Kundera

There are those who don't understand the nobility of horror fiction. 'Isn't there enough horror in the world?' they ask. For all other forms of literature, the value of human life is optional. For horror fiction, it's absolutely necessary. If we don't value the life of the threatened protagonist, we can't be scared. And through our fear, we better understand the individual fears and values of our species across the world. — E.C. McMullen Jr.

Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that. — Joe Wilson

It's not fiction's job to be photographically representative of reality. If I want to make a fictional world where there's no kindness, this doesn't mean I believe there's no kindness in the real world. In fact, what it may mean is that I very much value kindness. Like if you make a painting in which only greens are allowed, it wouldn't mean you don't believe in blue. — George Saunders

How we, too, are still pious. - In science, convictions have no right of citizenship, so it is said and with good reason: only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, a provisional experimental standpoint, a regulative fiction, may they be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge - though always with the restriction of remaining under police surveillance, under police suspicion. But, — Friedrich Nietzsche

...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value. — G.E. Moore

And within two weeks, Peter Foo was already proven right. Business for the firm expanded in leaps & bounds as both old & new clients wanted to meet the lovely slave girl that he kept naked in his penthouse & to partake of the ambrosial Nectar that she served. So much so that the three million dollars that he had paid for her was fully recovered out of profits. And new orders that flooded the firm showed that his initial investment on the girl would increase in value tenfold within a year.
He had therefore acquired the lovely slave girl, Briseis,for free. And that was why Peter Foo was likened by the Directors to Zeus/Jupiter, the King of the Gods.[MMT] — Nicholas Chong

The way we view fiction is a reflection of how we define ourselves as a nation. Works of the imagination are canaries in the coal mine, the measure by which we can evaluate the health of the rest of society. — Azar Nafisi

Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop - everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. — Virginia Woolf

Anyone who tells you life has greater value when it comes with an expiration date is full of shit. Immortality is worth the fortunes of galaxies."

She regarded him too intently. "But it's not worth everything. You gave it up for your freedom."

His forced bravado faltered. That truth still petrified him today. "I did. — G.S. Jennsen

All cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist. That this credit is no mere fiction, is shown not only by the occasional loss of wages on the bankruptcy of the capitalist,[181] but also by a series of more enduring consequences. — Karl Marx

What do you think it is that makes a man"
I started on the Definition. He cut me of after five words.
"It is not!" he said. "A wax figure could have all that, and he'd still be a wax figure, wouldn't he?" ...
"Well, then, what makes a man a man is something inside him."
"A soul?" I suggested.
"No ... souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like nails. No, what makes man man is mind; it's not a thing, it's a quality, and minds aren't all the same value; they're better or worse, and the better they are, the more they mean. — John Wyndham

This principle is taught in Scripture: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). In other words, we learn to be loving because we are loved. Grace must come from the outside for us to be able to develop it inside. The opposite side of this truth is that we can't love when we aren't loved. And, taking the thinking further, we can't value or treasure our souls when they haven't been valued or treasured. — Henry Cloud

Not much to say except to warn you not to get too serious about all this, if you want to become a writer of fiction in the future. If you intend to become a critic, that is a Whale of another color ... Playing around with symbols, even as a critic, can be a kind of kiddish parlor game. A little of it goes a long way. There are other things of greater value in any novel or story ... humanity, character analysis, truth on other levels ... Good symbolism should be as natural as breathing ... and as unobtrusive. — Ray Bradbury

I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous. — David Nicholls

My old man tells me every chance he gets I'm "style over substance" and that I've never done anything of value in my life. I'm fifteen. What does he expect? Being "cool as" is the only thing anyone cares about."
Burt, Book 1 "Making it — Jamie Scallion

Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards, and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children's Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not--or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader--the curious reader, the alert reader--to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned. — Alberto Manguel

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value. — Ben Lerner

How can we learn the value of saying no, if we didn't occasionally say yes? — F.D. Lee

Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea? — Dexter Palmer

I think that science fiction has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea. — Robert A. Heinlein

Whatever may be the sociological value of the legal fiction that 'all men are born free and equal,' there can be no doubt that ... in its biological application, at any rate, this statement is one of the most stupendous falsehoods ever uttered by man through his misbegotten gift of articulate speech. — Earnest Hooton

A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression" - from "The Art of Fiction — Henry James

Mayor Daley has no honor and his word has no value. The sneaky way he did this shows that he knows it was wrong. We're not going to allow the mayor to hide behind the fiction of homeland security for his reprehensible action. — Phil Boyer

When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life. — H.P. Lovecraft

Everywhere there are the politicians and the priest, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain that reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the novelist, those deep bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction. — Malcolm Bradbury

I have always believed there is great value in studying the flaws of mankind and men - even fictional characters. All of us are flawed. All of us are diminished by some form of prejudice and bias. If a fictional character is to be realistic, he must struggle with imperfections and weaknesses. — K. Lee Lerner

I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters. — Alain Robbe-Grillet

They're good, these stories," Mace continued, his cheeks stained with light color. "They teach the pain of others." "Empathy. Carlin always said it was the great value of fiction, to put us inside the minds of strangers. — Erika Johansen

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself. — Flannery O'Connor

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on. — Buddy Ebsen

I happen to believe that the deepest value of fiction is that, in its very fictiveness, it is the one arena where we can, at least temporarily, take apart and refuse to compete within the terms that the rest of existence insists on. Market value may come to drive out all other human values, except, perhaps, in the country of invented currency, the completely barter-driven economy of the imagination. Fiction, when it remembers its innate priority over other human transactions, can deal not in price but in worth. And that seems to me an act filled with political potential, as well as with pleasure. — Richard Powers

Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey. — Raymond Queneau

I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself. — Flannery O'Connor

To a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it; one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value. — Claire Messud

We translated the script together with them. And during the process of translation, they rewrote the scripts. They put a lot into it. They made it their own. There are names of plants or chants or certain rites and everything that you cannot come across it in a movie. You know, you cannot learn about them casually. So the film doesn't have value in the ethnographical, anthropological. It's fiction. — Ciro Guerra

Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:
"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be? — Haruki Murakami

Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra. — E. M. Forster

Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying Arthur C. Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults. — Alvin Toffler

In The Silver Chair, the Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum is all wisdom in rebutting the witch as she denies the existence of the world in which he believes. But as children's fiction isn't quite academically respectable, I'll pretend that I learned this from Blaise Pascal. [ ... ] If the world really is accidental and devoid of meaning, and you and I have no more value in the cosmos than you average bread mold, and Beauty and Goodness are artificial constructs imagined within an explosion, constructs that are controlled by chemical reactions within the accident and have no necessary correspondence to reality, then my made-up children's world licks your real world silly. Depart from me. Go drown in your seething accident. Puddleglum and I are staying here. — N.D. Wilson

The brain of the modern human is no longer capable of understanding reality directly. It used to be that a person lived, looked toward the horizon, howled at the moon, and formed his conceptions, however biased, based on his own experiences and observations. There used to be this thing called independent learning. Not anymore. They crystallize our brains like ice from water. Imagine how slowly, starting in childhood, your brain is crystallized for you, forming your conception of reality. We could even determine a unit of currency for all humanity, 'the value of one concept.' Everyone would have their own change purse, so to speak, and the coins in it, though of various values, quantities, styles, and metals, would all be from a single mint. — Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

All index-number systems, so far as they are intended to have a greater significance for monetary theory than that of mere playing with figures, are based upon the idea of measuring the utility of a certain quantity of money. The object is to determine whether a gramme of gold is more or less useful to-day than it was at a certain time in the past. As far as objective use-value is concerned, such an investigation may perhaps yield results. We may assume the fiction, if we like, that, say, a loaf of bread is always of the same utility in the objective sense, always comprises the same food value. It is not necessary for us to enter at all into the question of whether this is permissible or not. — Ludwig Von Mises

Though a good cop, Luc Claudel has the patience of a firecracker, the sensitivity of Vlad the Impaler, and a persistent skepticism as to the value of forensic anthropology.
Snappy dresser, though. — Kathy Reichs

That's just where I must part company with you, Inspector," said the Vicar with a gentle smile. "I'm rather a voracious reader of mystery stories, and it's always struck me that the detective in fiction is inclined to underrate the value of intuition. — John Bude

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. — Jeanette Winterson

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Journalism is not like fiction and will never be. In fiction, you can feed people with lies, yet at the end of the reading, people still live the same life - go to work, eat, come back home, and sleep - nothing really changes aside from, at the very least, their perception of the world. But, things are different in journalism. You tell people a barefaced life, they will believe it, and something is going to happen. People will promptly respond to what they believe is true because it relates to their life, and we take life seriously, don't we? — Aishah Madadiy

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories... All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not...

Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? — Karl Ove Knausgard

When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi — Faiqa Mansab

The state exists for man,not man for the state.The same may be said ofscience. These are old phrases,coined by people who saw in human individuality the highest human value .I would hesitate to repeat them,were it not for the ever recurring danger that they may be forgotten,especially in these days of organization and stereotypes. — Albert Einstein

Each of the sapiens brains generates its own perception of God in uniquely different ways. Ergo, it imposes different qualities of meaning and value on God. You see God the way your brain wants you to see it. There is no right and wrong, or fact and fiction on this matter. It is all personal. — Abhijit Naskar

Value' has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human - 'market value' is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average personal values, all of which must be quantitively different or trade would be impossible. — Robert A. Heinlein

Win demagnetized and then pried off the power chamber faring and tossed it aside. Then he started to laugh. And dance. And slap Dirck on the back. And dance some more. He was laughing so hard he was crying.
'Hey,' Dirck said, the entertainment value of his friend's behavior rapidly depreciating. 'Don't you think we ought to do what we have to and get out of here, before they send another veke? — Marcha A. Fox

In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy. — Arthur C. Clarke