Top 477 Fictional Quotes & Sayings

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

No Atlantis is too underwater or fictional.

I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, 'Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?' It’s just a painting.

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.

History is filled with fictional people.

As with real families, my fictional family on 'Life Goes On' had its ups and downs, and as part of the fictional downers, the actors were often called to cry on cue. This absolutely terrified me, because I was a pretty happy kid who didn't have much to cry about.

Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment.

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.

There is a certain fictional element that goes in playing a common person.

I'm really trying to stop setting my plays in this one fictional town in Vermont.

I love when you get the feeling of some social reality with a fictional film.

When you're training as an actor, a lot of the big work you're learning is to treat fictional characters like real people. You don't have the problem of discovering a backstory with real people, but there's always a mystery which is common to both fictional and factual characters. They are never quite the person you think they are.

I love building out the worlds of my fiction with fictional books.

I'm always a little apprehensive about 'decoding' fictional stories.

I discovered that there was no difference between playing a real-life character and a fictional one.

I have been challenged with the fictional languages I have to learn. I wasn't terrible at languages at school - I got an A in French, so I did well enough - but I didn't enjoy them. I'm not even sure if that plays into how well you learn a fictional language!

Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself.

I am not someone who throws around the word 'self-esteem.' It is a fictional description.

I love it when real science finds a home in a fictional setting, where you take some real core idea of science and weave it through a fictional narrative in order to bring it to life, the way stories can. That's my favorite thing.

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.

Let me also remind you that zero, like all of mathematics, is fictional and an idealization. It is impossible to reach absolute zero temperature or to get perfect vacuum. Luckily, mathematics is a fairyland where ideal and fictional objects are possible.

I quote fictional characters, because I'm a fictional character myself!

There should be unemployment insurance for fictional people.

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.

What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.

I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.

Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system.

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jincy Willett)

I wrote a piece of software in 1998 that created fictional weather.

What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you're doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, "Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!" And that's how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.

History is basically really looking back and finding out what happened to an individual, a community, a family, a group in a certain event. And so that's why I go, "Wow. That's what acting really is. You find out the background, you get the joy of creating a fictional history of a fictional character and you get to tell a story." So I felt that acting is making history come alive and it became my mode of trying to figure out what this craft of acting is really all about.

I love the idea of fictional worlds kind of all cohering in some way.

There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

Life would be so much easier if fictional boys were real.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

Our identity is fictional, written by parents, relatives, education, society.

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

Any fictional story will take things from real events.

It's more difficult playing a real-life person than a fictional character - you can go easy on yourself with a fictional character.

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.

The best test to know whether an entity is real or fictional is the test of suffering. A nation cannot suffer, feel pain or fear, or has no consciousness. Even if it loses a war, the soldier suffers, the civilians suffer, but the nation cannot suffer. Similarly, a corporation cannot suffer, when it loses its value, it doesn't suffer. All these things, they're fictions. If people bear in mind this distinction, it could improve the way we treat one another and the other animals. It's not a good idea to cause suffering to real entities in the service of fictional stories.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

Blurryface is a fictional character and a reference to insecurities, which I think all people have.

The best moment in writing any book is when you just can't wait to get back to the writing, when you can't wait to re-enter that fictional place, when your fictional town feels even more real than the town where you actually live.

It can be a fictional character and yet relatable... It always depends on the content of the film and what you are doing.

I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives.

I fictionship. I love fictional men.

If people ever look down upon you for crying for fictional characters, you should give them a gentle, pitying look and feel bad for them. If they've never cried for a fictional character, then they've never loved one (and what a joy that is). If they've never cried at a book, a movie, a piece of music, then they've missed one of the great pleasures life has to offer. Just because fiction does not contain things that are real doesn't mean it doesn't contain truth, and we find it through the alchemy of our tears.

I've got no business giving advice to anyone. Even a fictional character.

I don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real!

It was interesting to do a completely fictional piece. You know, Saving Private Ryan was not a fictional piece! So the challenge was: How do you incorporate real emotions? How do you incorporate aspects that people are going to be able to identify with?

Talking out loud to fictional characters is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you look at television shows, which of course are fictional so you don't expect them to be real, but they're constantly showing career women who are also successful mothers and also look gorgeous. And we fall into believing that these fictional lives are somehow accurate depictions of what our real lives should be about.

History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.