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We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an au...more

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When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both...more

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You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

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I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

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All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are "correct". For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators...more

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There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

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As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an Ame...more

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There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is ...more

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We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their...more

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Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

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As a child of privilege, no one is your friend. They will claim to be your friends, they will laugh at your jokes and invite you to their parties, but...more

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They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. W...more

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I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right...more