Varley O'Connor Quotations

The fact is fiction is always a representation of life, sometimes the lives of famous people.

Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.

Fiction seeks to represent human experience as it is lived and as it reverberates in our hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. So much of our lives are internal. The art of fiction has claimed - more than anything else - this internal ground as its own.

What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.