Avi Quotes

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

The great thing about books is that you can end with a question mark.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

I enjoy looking beyond the obvious and look at the stories happening all around me - you kind of formulate things in your mind and get excited about them.

Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.

From inside where I live, I feel like I just perceive events in a certain rational way. I often find it sad or poignant, and it may not make me laugh a bit. But I don't mind inventing a portrait that allows others to laugh if that's what they want to do.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.