A COLLECTION OF GOOD WORDS
小说
Fiction
Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars.
多年的科幻小说形成了一种观念，认为人类的命运就是要从地球扩展到月球、火星和星星。
One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.
我们喜欢小说的一个原因是故事有一个令人舒适的形状。它们提供了我们日常生活中缺乏的决心。
Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.
当乔纳斯回到家，告诉他的妻子他迟到了三天，因为他被鲸鱼吞了。
The novel, if it be anything, is contemporary history, an exact and complete reproduction of social surroundings of the age we live in.
这部小说可以说是一部现代史，是对我们所处时代社会环境的准确而完整的再现。
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
好的小说创造同理心。一部小说带你去某个地方，让你透过另一个人的眼睛去看另一个人，去过另一种生活。
Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.
正如在小说中一样，幽默在诗歌中也是一条优美的线。我只是觉得它更难写。也很难保持读者的尊重。
The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.
小说的第一个谎言是作者给混乱的生活安排了秩序:时间顺序，或者作者选择的任何顺序。
I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
我喜欢模糊事实和虚构之间的界限，但又不愿屈尊于读者，让他们陷入某种后现代主义的牢笼。
Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.
小说帮助我重新与日常生活中固有的真实、深刻的怪异联系起来，在我们与他人的交往中，在活着的过程中。
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
传记是一个非常明确的地域，它以历史为北，以小说为南，以讣告为东，以沉闷为西。
The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.
事实上，每个作家，不管是小说还是非小说，都在尝试写一些真正原创的东西，这就是我认为我在做的。
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
鉴于外部现实是虚构的，作者的角色几乎是多余的。他不需要虚构，因为小说已经存在了。
KEEP EXPLORING
沿着这个主题，再读几句。
First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.
首先，写作充其量——当然是小说写作——我认为越来越多的写作是有魔力的。
Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.
今天的录音技术在四十年前会被认为是科幻小说。
I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.
我没有什么特别的仪式，但我不会写小说，除非我有几个小时的时间。对我来说，我需要一段时间来适应一种真正集中注意力的模式。
Science fiction made me aware of how big and strange the universe was, leaving aside the whole question of aliens.
科幻小说让我意识到宇宙有多大，有多奇怪，把外星人这个问题抛诸脑后。
The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.
真实与虚构的区别在于，虚构必须有意义。
I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.
我开始写作的时候，只是做一些与写作相关的小事情，而不是写作本身。我不知道怎么写小说。所以我做新闻是因为我可以学到一些规则。你可以教别人写新闻故事。他们可能写得不好，但你可以很容易地教他们。