Saved by Tara McMullin and
With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premi
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
Fiction, even of the most "realistic" kind, represents what never happened, what isn't, but what maybe yet could be, in a different world than this. It's always moving in opposition to reality. All art is motion, and in motion. A good story goes in a direction that we were unable, previously, to see.
Lyta Gold • Dangerous Fictions
Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Left Hand of Darkness: 50th Anniversary Edition (Ace Science Fiction)
“the best of fiction is literally false but symbolically true. It uses made-up people and non-existent events to explore and understand eternal questions that haunt the hearts of men. Great fiction uses lies to get to the truth, and it’s this truth that people are after.”
— Hit Reverse: New Ideas From Old Books by Jash Dholani
... See more
— Hit Reverse: New Ideas From Old Books by Jash Dholani
... See more
“Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that is makes sense. We force the world to be coherent—to tell us a story.
Not only fiction writers do this; we all do it; we do it constantly, continually, in order to survive. People who can’t make the world into a story go made. Or, like infants or (perha
... See moreReality is something qualitatively different from fiction, and fiction is only dangerous when we don't respect that difference—when we forget that it serves a fundamentally different purpose and appeals to different needs.