#on-fiction

"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."

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."

"Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream."

"Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,How much would novels gain by the exchange!How differently the world would men behold!"

"A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries."

"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."

"I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story."

"The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ..."

"In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies."

"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?"

"Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love."

"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth."

"A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth."

"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."

"Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency,"or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery."

"Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring."

"Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life."

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."