Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

John Green
About This Quote

It is natural to refer to a fictional story in relation to the world of the reader in which the story takes place. It is also natural for readers to make guesses about events in a fictional story, especially when it comes to mysterious characters in the story. But it is an act of denial to deny that stories are just stories, and that they have no bearing on our world outside of fiction. Nods to famous people are only accidental, not deliberate, and they are just as likely to be true as any other assumption about fictional characters.

Source: The Fault In Our Stars

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