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 s...
Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.
The best fiction is true.
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.
History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the sam...
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.
Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.
The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.
Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
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 found...
There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
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.
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 unders...
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.