Fiction Purpose Quotes

I think what a lot of fiction is, is the imagining of the worst so as to prepare ourselves.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

Fiction has always been a way of examining society and its flaws and trying to expose them.

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

Why do fairy tales exist, and why do movies exist? Why do novels exist? There has to be a reason for it; otherwise, none of these things would be there.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

The purpose of fiction is not to nail you to the ground as facts do, but to take you to the edge of the cliff and kick you off so you build your wings on the way down.

I think most fiction focuses on uncomfortable settings because that's interesting.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.

Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.

Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

Fiction is a place where people can meet, where they take the time to very seriously examine and think about the experiences of other people and about the sorts of moral decisions those characters are making.

The purpose of fiction is to combat loneliness.

The role of fiction is supposed to be divorced from the role of reality.

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.