"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
— G.K. Chesterton

"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
— Jessamyn West

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"The Queen's Pride was his ship, and he loved her. (That was the way his sentences always went: It is raining today and I love you. My cold is better and I love you. Say hello to Horse and I love you. Like that.)"
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice."
— Michael Crichton (State of Fear)

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
— E.M. Forster

"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory; you must remember this."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"...I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)

"Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."
— Azar Nafisi

"We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love."
— Tim Farrington (The Monk Downstairs)

"A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"'Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.'"
— Jane Yolen (The Books of Great Alta: Comprising 'Sister Light, Sister Dark' and 'White Jenna')

"I can't go on, I'll go on."
— Samuel Beckett (I Can't Go On, I'll Go on: A Selection from Samuel Beckett's Work)

"Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it."
— Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings)

"Try to find pleasure in the speed that you're not used to. Changing the way you do routine things allows a new person to grow inside of you. But when all is said and done, you're the one who must decide how you handle it."
— Paulo Coelho

"It was spring break in Forks again. When I woke up Monday morning,I lay in bed a few seconds absorbing that."
— Stephenie Meyer

" If you lose your purpose ... it's like you're broken. "
— Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret)

""We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love." from The Monk Downstairs "
— Tim Farrington

""Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes shape.""
— Sheri Reynolds

"I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist. "
— Berkeley Breathed

"I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been borht with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!"
— Ralph Ellison

"Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere."
— Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots)

"When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story."
— Charles Baxter (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction)

"There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.

'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.'"
— John Champlin Gardner Jr. (Grendel)

"A good book isn't written, it's rewritten."
— Phyllis A. Whitney (Guide to Fiction Writing)

"This book is so interesting. I always wonder what's going to happen next."
— Neal Shusterman (Everlost)

"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 (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"I was trying to have an insight, and all I could think of was that I'd backed myself into a corner, and the corner was me."
— John Welter (Night of the Avenging Blowfish: A Novel of Covert Operations, Love, and Luncheon Meat)

"I know when my life is over my writtings will live on, perhaps in a story or maybe a sweet love song. You see, I do not write for glory or to get anything for free. I just sit down and I write, because it makes so much sense to me."
— Terri F. Williams (Momma's Love)

"guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine"
— Fay Weldon

"God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.
Surely, while we live we are not lost.
Oh Janos, Janos my brother!
Surely we are not lost--while we live."
— John Hepworth

"For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said."
— Virginia Woolf

"In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill."
— Eileen Favorite (The Heroines)

"The deer hovered by the trees beyond as the sounds of the ravening wolves came to them across the grass, their own senses almost frozen in impotent horror."
— David Clement-Davies

"I came, I saw, I concurred..."
— Darren E. Laws (Turtle Island)

"The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom."
— Charles Dickens

"You'll have to learn to forgive," he said. "For if you don't, you know what will happen?"
"What, Doctor?" I croaked, for my outburst had exhausted me.
"It will destroy you," he said as he handed me the tea.
A tear came into my eye when he said it for I knew it was true and I would have loved to be able to do it (not because of its destroying me but because it was right, and deep down I knew that) but I couldn't and the more I thought of it the more the blood came coursing to my head so that whenever I'd write I'd find myself clutching the pencil so tight I broke the lead how many times I don't know, hundreds."
— Patrick McCabe (Breakfast on Pluto)