Ralph Peters Quotes

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

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

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.

I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.

I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.

I've never turned into a bee - I've never been chased by a mummy or met a ghost. But many of the ideas in my books are suggested by real life.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Movies aren't just supposed to be a representation of reality. They're supposed to be an art.

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.

There is a part of me that has to depend on fantasy, because if you can't be somewhat of a fantasy person, then you can't write

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.

The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.