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"It is not my purpose in writing a story of an adulterous man to make it clear how right we all are if we disapprove of the act and are disappointed in the man. Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everybody seems to hold, nor does it seek to guarantee the appropriateness of our feelings. The world of fiction, in fact, frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling; one of the greatnesses of the art is that it allows both the writer and the reader to respond to experience in ways not always available in day-to-day conduct; or, if they are available, they are not possible, or manageable, or legal, or advisable, or even necessary to the business of living. We may not even know that we have such a range of feelings and responses until we come into contact with the work of fiction." Philip Roth   "If the real world becomes fiction only by revealing the hidden side of the human beings who inhabit it, the reverse is equally true: the most real, the 'roundest' characters of fiction are those we know most intimately, precisely in ways we could never know people in real life. 'I confess,' writes Mann in an essay on a rival art, 'that in everything regarding knowledge of men as individual beings, I regard drama as an art of the silhouette, and only narrated man as round, whole, real, and fully shaped.' But this means that the special life-likeness of narrative fiction—as compared to dramatic and cinematic fictions—depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind thinks, another body feels. In depicting the inner life, the novelist is truly a fabricator." Dorrit Cohn   "Non-fiction is a form of literature that lies half-way between fiction and fact." Scott Fitzgerald   "The yearly income is an obsessive motif in women's fiction at the turn of the eighteenth century. Women novelists of all ranks and political opinions join hands to calculate and confirm the specific spending power of different annual incomes. Sense and Sensibility simply extends and amends a familiar financial plot shared across the whole span of contemporary women's fiction. Not to know it is to miss half the action." Edward Copeland   "It is much easier for a movie, TV series, or other work of fiction to portray the importance of heroic individuals than that of political institutions. Luke, Leia, and Han Solo inspire our empathy and admiration far more readily than a legislature, a court, or a well-run bureaucracy ever could. Star Wars, like many other works of fiction, implicitly conveys the message that the antidote to tyranny and oppression is to make sure the right people are in power." Ilya Somin   "Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it." David Foster Wallace   "It is simply not true that works of fiction, prose or verse, that is to say works depicting the actions, thoughts and words and passions of imaginary human beings, directly extend our knowledge of life. Direct knowledge of life is knowledge directly in relation to ourselves, it is our knowledge of how people behave in general, of what they are like in general, in so far as that part of life in which we ourselves have participated gives us material for generalization. Knowledge of life obtained through fiction is only possible by another stage of self-consciousness. That is to say, it can only be a knowledge of other people's knowledge of life, not of life itself." Thomas Stearns Eliot   "When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction." Philip Roth   "Salinger's vast public, I am convinced, is based not merely on the number of young people who recognize their emotional problems in his fiction and their frustrated rebellions in the sophisticated language he manipulates so skillfully. It is based perhaps even more on all those who have been released by our society to think of themselves as endlessly 'sensitive,' spiritually alone, gifted—and whose suffering lies in the narrowing of their consciousness to themselves, in the withdrawal of their curiosity from a society which they think they understand all too well, in the drying-up of their hope, their trust, and their wonder at the great world itself." Alfred Kazin   "You don't go to great fiction to be comforted." Alice McDermott   "I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves." David Foster Wallace   "In Wilde the artist revolted not against society but against life. Instead of having passions the artist had sensations, but even these in an abstracted, contemplative way. Whistler, in many things Wilde's mentor, had said that to ask the artist to paint life was like telling the player to sit on the piano. Wilde went a step further; to ask a man to live life was also an impertinence. No, 'the first duty in life is to assume a pose; what the second is no one yet has found out.' The pose is that manner which takes one furthest away from the passion and brutality of life. 'Create yourself; be yourself your poem.' 'I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.' No doubt the attitude was an overstatement, but it was a systematic one, with deep roots in the life of a man who went to court to prove that his conventional pose of respectability was true even though he knew it was not." Richard Ellmann   "I cannot recall dental care featuring prominently in English fiction until Graham Greene, who is obsessed with teeth to an almost pathological degree. The Victorians, I think, were generally philosophical about dental decay—although the middle and upper classes (particularly the upper) were not entirely negligent of oral hygiene. As the German historian Treitschke scathingly noted, 'the English think Soap is Civilization.'" John Sutherland   "The author's deepest pride, as I have experienced it, is not in his incidental wisdom but in his ability to keep an organized mass of images moving forward, to feel life engendering itself under his hands. But no doubt, fiction is also a mode of spying; we read it as we look in windows or listen to gossip, to learn what other people do. Insights of all kinds are welcome; but no wisdom will substitute for an instinct for action and pattern, and a perhaps savage wish to hold, through your voice, another soul in thrall." John Updike   "Microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages have become very frequent in recent years. They are not always fatal. Some people get over them. It's a typical modern disease. I think its causes are of a moral order. The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity." Boris Pasternak   "I am a mere constitutional fiction, a face on the postage stamps, a signature at the bottom of decrees written by unidentified powers behind the throne over which I have no control. I am manipulated by competing factions about whose divisions and debates I am kept ignorant. Even my private entertainments are devised for me by invisible courtiers working in parts of the palace that I have never entered, and could never find my way to. (And where did the idea for this inquiry come from? What dark purpose—and whose—was it intended to serve?) All I can ever know about this world behind my back is its product—the words I utter on its behalf, the mysterious masques I find myself watching." Michael Frayn   "By trying to eliminate every anomaly, every weakness, we end up denying the principal virtue of health: a lack of concern about oneself or, as Leriche put it, the 'silence of the organs' (even if the latter may be deceptive). The hair shirt is not worn to restrain the impulses of rebellious flesh, but rather to punish an imperfect body for not corresponding to the ideal model. This is the outcome of the old Christian prediction of immortality and the resurrection of 'glorious bodies' that are incorruptible, will never rot or wither, and are found in science fiction. Our wild scientific fantasies come directly from religion, of which they claim to be the fulfillment." Pascal Bruckner   "It crushes each individual beneath the weight of the sum of individuals represented by it; it oppresses each private interest in the name of a general interest which is incarnate in itself. The democratic fiction confers on the rulers the authority of the whole." Bertrand de Jouvenal   "The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, 'Your verb here does not agree with your subject.' That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for 'formal' writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man." Anthony Esolen   "A biography called Jane Austen, Obstinate Heart, published in Spring 1997, by Valerie Grosvenor Myer, rivets our attention to the matter of Jane's cut-price hair-dos and futile attempts to economize when buying a muslin veil. We attend at the myriad social humiliations of a young and pretty woman without a penny of her own, and see her wither into celibate spite, sneering at her married neighbors and their obstetric difficulties and cracking jokes about the deaths of newborn babies. A pleasant woman? Clearly not. But certainly one grounded in reality. Auden put it like this:   You could not shock her more than she shocks me;   Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass,   It makes me most uncomfortable to see   An English spinster of the middle class   Describe the amorous effects of 'brass,'   Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety   The economic basis of society. Perhaps Jane did believe that the iron laws that govern nations govern the delicate negotiations of the heart. At any rate, all modern biographers want to pull her away from the context of the 'three or four families in a country village' that she recommended as a subject for fiction." Hilary Mantel