There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side. Theodore Roosevelt
About This Quote

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, said this quote when discussing what his purpose was as a writer. Sir Arthur was a noted physician and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first published novel was The Mystery of the Sea. Sir Doyle believed that his job as a novelist was to help people through reading his work and not to be so depressing and hold back the reader. Sir "Sherlock" believed that fiction should be enjoyed as well as useful and that it should not be used to teach horrible lessons. Sir Doyle also said that he would probably never write another book as long as he lived because he felt that after writing about crime and misery, he had written all that he could bear to write about.

Source: Theodore Roosevelts Letters To His Children

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