Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my n...
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.
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.
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...
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
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.
The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.
There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.
Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.
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.
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
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...
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.
But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.
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...