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Since the dawn of humanity, stories have allowed each of us to be many.

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Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten...more

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enter the world of things as they are

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There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

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We owe it to each other to tell stories.

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Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

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My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each...more

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Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie tha...more

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Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols ...more

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Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit,...more

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So I believe in the redeeming power of stories, I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us ...more

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The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and yo...more

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The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best p...more

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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...more

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Once upon a time,’ is code for ‘I’m lying to you.’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people vi...more