Penn Jillette Quotes

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

You can't just trust to luck; you have to really listen to what that character is telling you.

The make-believe world of 'The Black Tower' succeeds by broadcasting larger truths that might otherwise elude us.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

We had a few non-fiction books at home, but my dad was of the opinion that fiction was a complete and utter waste of time because it wasn't real - so what was the point of reading it?

Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It's just they are equally interested in exploring both.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.

I sometimes find reality far more fantastical and unlikely than what I could just make up.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

Truth is so much more interesting than the fiction we're used to.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

When I was little, I made up my own fairy tales, and the ghostly echo of 'Once upon a time' shapes all the fiction I've ever written.

It's supposed to be entertainment. It's not supposed to be a documentary.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

Just because it's in a movie doesn't mean it's real.

When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.

People don't like reality, they like crazy stories.

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.