Robin Sloan Quotes

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

All the great history has been written with passion …. Fiction is history from below.

I am a storyteller by trade.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

I've always been fascinated with storytelling.

I love how 'Game of Thrones' has resonated with so many people around the world. I feel like it has really tapped into our need to hear stories about the human condition, love, death, good, evil... For me, it really is a modern version of the old Greek theatre or cave men sitting around fires telling stories.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

The greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.

We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that's where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe.

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.

Legends don't have to make sense. They just have to be beautiful. Or at least interesting.

Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora's box, a story that's freely given can't be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.

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

All great novels are great fairy tales.

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

A myth is a lie that conveys a truth.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.