On Fiction Quotes

All stories are true. But some of them never happened.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

But wishes are only granted in fairy tales.

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

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

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own “real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.