A Quote by Arthur Smith

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.

Arthur Smith

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Autobiography Between Books Boring Fact Fiction Large Lodge Travel Travel Books

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Arthur Smith
English - Comedian
Born: November 27, 1954

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

Paul Theroux

Only idiots or snobs ever really thought less of 'genre books' of course. There are stupid books and there are smart books. There are well-written books and badly written books. There are fun books and boring books. All of these distinctions are vastly more important than the distinction between the literary and the non-literary.

Stephen Marche

Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.

William Golding

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

Philip Roth

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

Garth Greenwell

I prefer non-fiction to fiction. In fact, I don't read fiction at all. I read books that are based on true events.

Diana Penty

Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

Duane Michals

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

P. D. James

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction.

Dinaw Mengestu

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

Francine Prose

Books are great, but travel is the greatest teacher. If you have a choice, choose to travel. Not everywhere you go will be wonderful and life-altering; in fact, some places may underwhelm you and that, too, is an experience.

Shweta Bachchan Nanda

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

P. D. James

We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood -- between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural.

Robert Green Ingersoll

China lacks good science fiction, but not mediocre science fiction. Even so, the gap between Chinese and American sci-fi is still very large and it is most apparent in quality of the works.

Liu Cixin

For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.

Dennis Ritchie

I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today - that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed.

Margaret Atwood

A Quote by Arthur Smith

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