A plot is about things that happen. A story is about people who behave — Fiction

"People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!"

"Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future. The American way of life is spontaneously fictional, since it is a transcending of the imaginary in reality."

"The author of any work of fiction that is any good takes me so fully into his orbit that he becomes my friend; I think Im his or her friend and I really want to be that kind of person. If on reflection I dont ask myself: "Is that really the kind of person I want to be?" "The kind of friend he or she has tried to make me—is that the kind of person I want to be?" then, of course, very serious deformations of the spirit can occur. The thing that can save us from that is to read a lot; then the deformations that one author will produce will be canceled by the others."

"You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of the author."

"Truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction."

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writers task is to invent the reality."