Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

 

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.
--
Letter written in September 1915, published in Frederick R Karl and Laurence Davies (eds.) The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad Vol. 5, p. 509. ISBN 0521323894

 

Joseph Conrad

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I am a damned sight smarter man than Grant. I know more about military history, strategy, and grand tactics than he does. I know more about supply, administration, and everything else than he does. I'll tell you where he beats me though and where he beats the world. He doesn't give a damn about what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell. … I am more nervous than he is. I am more likely to change my orders or to countermarch my command than he is. He uses such information as he has according to his best judgment; he issues his orders and does his level best to carry them out without much reference to what is going on about him and, so far, experience seems to have fully justified him.

 

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Once the curtain is raised, the actor ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third. And to this end the actor must forget his personality and throw aside his joys and sorrows. He must present the public with the reality of a being who for him is only a fiction. With his own eyes, he must shed the tears of the other. With his own voice, he must groan the anguish of the other. His own heart beats as if it would burst, for it is the other's heart that beats in his heart. And when he retires from a tragic or dramatic scene, if he has properly rendered his character, he must be panting and exhausted.

 

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Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

 

J. G. Ballard

 

The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.

 

Tom Clancy

 

Do not, under any circumstances belittle a works of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

 

Azar Nafisi