Fiction Role Quotes

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.

… fiction may be admitted to vouch for the genius of nations, while history has nothing to offer that is entitled to credit

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.

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

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality.

fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.

Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.