Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

there is nothing that swims, crawls, walks, or flies that tells stories. Man alone is the storytelling animal.

And, as I’ve been trying to argue, the literature of the fantastic is not genre fiction but, in its own way, as realistic as naturalistic fiction; it just comes into the real through a different door. A naturalistic novel is entirely capable of being escapist: Read a little chick lit and you’ll see what I mean. The truth is not arrived at by purely

the children we were, the children who are still within us, the children who understand wonderland, who know the truth about stories, save the adults, who have forgotten those truths.

The children fell in love with stories easily and lived in stories too; they made up play stories every day, they stormed castles and conquered nations and sailed the ocean blue, and at night their dreams were full of dragons. They were all storytellers now, makers of stories as well as receivers of stories. But they went on growing up and slowly t

Madame Bovary and a flying carpet are both untrue, and, what’s more, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up. I’m in favor of continuing to make things up. Only by unleashing the fictionality of fiction, the imaginativeness of the imagination, the dream songs of our dreams, can we hope to approach the new, and to create fiction

Animal fables—including talking-dead-fish fables—have been among the most enduring tales in the Eastern canon, and the best of them, unlike, say, the fables of Aesop, are amoral. They don’t seek to preach about humility or modesty or moderation or honesty or abstinence. They do not guarantee the triumph of virtue. As a result, they seem remarkably

Sadly, of the Hazar Afsaneh itself not a single copy survives. This book is the great “missing link” of world literature, the fabled volume through which the wonder tales of India traveled west to encounter, eventually, the Arabic language and to turn into The Thousand Nights and One Night,

But I mourn the loss of the Hazar Afsaneh, which would, if rediscovered, complete the story of the stories, and what a find that would be. Perhaps it would solve a mystery at the heart of the frame story, or rather at the very end of it, and answer a question I’ve been asking myself for some years: Did Scheherazade and her sister, Dunyazad, finally

My advice would be a little different. Only write what you know if what you know is really interesting.