Janet Fitch Quotes

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

I don't know why my leading men have grey shades. Maybe I am trying to explore that side of me through them.

You make up a character, there's always gonna be parts of you that, like it or not, shine through.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

To know, to think, to dream. That is everything.

Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self.

I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.

We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

Our passions are ourselves.

The term "self" seems a suitable one for the unconscious substrate whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego. The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors that radiate outward from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, as an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself; rather, I happen to myself.

I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

I am not just what I remember. I am also what I dream.

Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that animates us.

What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

My imaginary friends have become my imaginary children.