Top 1200 Reading Fiction Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.

I realized that for many people attending a reading is like watching television at the end of a long day. They don't want to be sad but to laugh. Chances are they'll pick the sitcoms over the horror movies. So I learned that, while one's larger body of fiction can have quite a bit of sadness and conflict and tragedy in it , in a reading environment, the average audience member seems able to tolerate only a little bit of sadness. They'd much rather the reading be sexy, funny, and witty. Life is hard these days. There's more than enough sadness in the world, so I can't blame them.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

The novels are always morphing into something else now, some kind of hybrid, more of a ground that isn't so easily specified. I suppose you could call it creative non-fiction, and rather focused on the natural world, which is what I'm most interested in reading these days. At least that would be the closest thing, but my books also include some fiction, so they're difficult to pinpoint.

That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

Meta-fiction doesn't depend on the illusion that you're reading about real people.

I don't tackle major global events. I don't like to read about something - an event, a cataclysm - in fiction for the sake of reading it.

Even as a little kid, I told lots of stories, and I wrote them down, and I loved reading fiction and fantasy.

Life is not a piece of tragic fiction in which, at the end of the reading, we all get up and go out for drinks.

Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.

As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.

As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!

A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.

If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.

For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.

Fiction is more dangerous than nonfiction because it can seduce better. I think we all know this, know that deeper truths can be approached in fiction than in fact. There are risks for the reader, because after reading certain books you find you have changed irreversibly. There are risks for writers: in China, now, and Ethiopia and other countries right now, writers face real persecution.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.

It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.

My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books.

When reading fiction, we cannot automatically assume that what we read is fact.

I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it.

I'm terrible at reading fiction. I don't have the attention span - it's awful.

I grew up reading crime fiction and, especially in the '80s, women were just there to be saved or screwed.

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

Anchors aren't just creating fiction; they're becoming characters in the fiction they themselves create. In the world of TV channels, facts are presented like fiction, so governments aren't inconvenienced; fiction is presented like fact, so governments stay happy.

The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.

I couldn't think of anything more pointless than reading a piece of fiction written by a robot.

A lot of the science fiction that I grew up reading was written when we still thought that Venus might be an oceanic planet.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

Questions are fiction, and answers are anything from more fiction to science-fiction.

I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

My mother was a part of a reading group, but they would never come near science fiction because they think it's not for them.

I spent my youth reading books in which corporations became governments, it's an old idea in science fiction.

I'm always reading several books at the same time, depending on how deeply engrossed in it I am, if it's fiction and if it captures me.

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.

Reading Tomato Red-the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon-was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself-of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift.

With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy—something a lot of people didn’t notice and maybe still don’t. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.

I probably spend more time writing than reading science fiction. I find that science-fiction literature is so reactive to all the literature that's gone before that it's sort of like a fractal. It's gone to a level of detail that the average person could not possibly follow unless you're a fan. It iterates upon many prior generations of iterations.

It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.

I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'

I've just finished reading 'The Second Plane,' and I think it's some of the best non-fiction I've ever read.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.

In novels you're able to occupy character's internal thoughts and it's really hard to do in a film or a TV show. When you're reading a character's thoughts or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me that's what the whole point of fiction is.

I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.

Those who relish the study of character may profit by the reading of good works of fiction, the product of well-established authors.

There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader - and the writer.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.