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1 " That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. "
― Tim O'Brien
2 " I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction. "
― Flannery O'Connor , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
3 " Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend. "
4 " Don't they understand what fiction is? "
― Lauren Groff , Fates and Furies
5 " That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth. "
6 " I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it. "
― Neil Gaiman
