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...

Fiction wouldn’t be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.

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.

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

…required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you’re really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn’t usually work out that way.

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

real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

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...

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.

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 reveals truth that reality obscures.

…all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

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 name’s...

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors–we hope–of your life come from reading fiction.

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..

The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing – and everything – about it is real.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

T.G.T.B.T: too good to be true.

A good book isn’t written, it’s rewritten.