Ellen Glasgow Quotes

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

All I ever wanted to do is to write stories that people will enjoy and feel at home with.

I'm a storyteller, not a prophet. I'm just interested in a good story.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Writers should be applauded for their ability to make things up.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.