'Harry Potter' really harnessed the imagination of so many young-adult minds, and it's the same with the 'Divergent' series.
Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.
Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.
I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?
You hear about bombings in other countries, or numbers like "10,000 people died" - you hear that number and you think, "Well, I saw that yesterday in a film, and that didn't look so bad." Younger viewers, in particular, lose perspective on reality.
Yeah, it’s really great. I mean, the clonesbians—you know, I have to say, I feel sometimes that fiction can reflect reality and sometimes even affect it. And I’m really proud to play a gay character whose main problem is not that she’s gay, which it shouldn’t be for anyone. So, I’m really proud of that.
The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.
The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.
There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
Fiction supplies the only philosophy that may readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world.
