#on-fiction

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."

"A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written."

"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!"

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

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

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

"A good book isn't written, it's rewritten."

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

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

"Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.."

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

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

"if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones."

"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."

"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?"