Thomas Hardy Quotes

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

Every moral has a story, every story has and end. Every battle has its glory, and its consequence.

In the old fairy tales, often a 'moral' was tacked on at the end of the story - say, if a book was going to be marketed to young readers. And the morals don't really suit the stories at all, which makes them super weird - part of why I love the tradition so much. I do play with this, though I am more concerned with ethics than morals.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets,lies,stories. We all tell them. Sometimes,because we hope to entertain. Sometimes,because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.

Science Fiction has always been and will always be a fable teacher of morality.

Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

The stories I create are never as awful as reality.

A master was once unmoved by the complaints of his disciples that, though they listened with pleasure to his parables and stories, they were also frustrated for they longed for something deeper. To all their objections he would simply reply: 'You have yet to understand, my friends, that the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story.'

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.

The bearers of fables are very welcome.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories.

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.

All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean.

All stories are true.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

Stories are important...They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?