I know that personal relations are the real life, for ever and ever.
E.M. Forster
The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.
Flannery O’Connor
That what we choose is real only because we choose it. Perhaps what we have not chosen is even more real. Perhaps those lives are being led anyway in some other realm. There are official stories and then there are unofficial stories. Sometimes we break through the official story. We escape into an alternate story.
Kristjana Gunnars
Is reality determined by words on paper? If that is true then when I write is real. What I write exists. Unless it is written it does not exist. It never happened.
Kristjana Gunnars
I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me.
Margaret Atwood Second Words
No form, of course, really ever succeeds as one would like it to; the finished novel is never as good as the one which existed in the mind. But that is a condition of this profession, and one must accept it.
Margaret Laurence, “Gadgetry or Growing” (An address at UofT, 1969)
Reality is what we invent.
Nicole Brossard
There are those who think a story is told only to reveal what is known in this world. But a good story also reveals the unknown.
Susan Griffin
Crazy, that what you do at the desk can precede what happens beyond the windows.
Timothy Findley
Nothing like having your fantasy disrupted by the probabilities of reality.
Ursula Hegi