This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it human and otherwise are imaginary excepting only certain of the fairy folk whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying 'By the time you get this Daddy I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

Truth is always strange stranger than fiction.

Truth is so hard to tell it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

For truth is always strange stranger than fiction.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature to those who really like to study people is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction after all has to make sense.

Truth is stranger than fiction but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities Truth isn't.

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

In this choice as I look back over more than half a century I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

I read everything: fiction history science mathematics biography travel.

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

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment caused by nature or the universe or technology what readers want to see is how people cope and so the character are present to cope or fail to cope.

I have taught history on the high school and college levels and am or have been a lecturer at the Smithsonian The National Institutes of Health and numerous colleges and universities mostly on science fiction and technology subjects.

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction an addiction and a tacit conspiracy.

To achieve lasting literature fictional or factual a writer needs perceptive vision absorptive capacity and creative strength.