John FowlesWhy should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?'' For fun?'' Fun! ' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.
About This Quote
This quote is by the American novelist and poet John Steinbeck and it is a response to a letter from a woman who wrote to him asking for his opinion on the story she wanted to write. She was also asking him to tell her whether her story had any truth in it. Steinbeck's reply was that he could not get involved with someone else's fiction, that he could not get involved in someone else's dream. He said that fiction was something that was written down, not something that happened in real life. When reading fiction, he explained, one becomes so absorbed in it that one cannot see things around oneself.
He is saying that in creating a work of fiction, the writer’s imagination is free to roam without being interrupted by anything in his own life. If you want to know if the facts are true or not, you have to go through hundreds of pages of facts and check them yourself. You have to check for yourself if there are real facts in the book.
Source: The Magus
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