A Quote by Hunter S. Thompson
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.
Related Quotes
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist.
My work is always based on reality. I'm not an artist that creates works of fiction. I'm not an artist who is in my studio inventing things out of my imagination - everything is based on reality, on real facts.
Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.
My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.
I'm not writing about the 1 percent of people who have this fairy-tale, amazing life. I'm writing about people like me, who maybe had a rough childhood.
The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
I think the big thing is the fairy tale. It's taking old folk fairy tales and retelling them in modern day. I think it's just taking you out of everyday life, and everyone loves a good fairy tale.
The definition of disappointment in life is expectations minus reality equals disappointment. The only two solutions you have to get over disappointment is to either alter your reality or alter your expectations.
I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.
Do you think if it was the fairy tale about a man who lived inside of a whale and it was religion that Jack built a beanstalk today, you would know the difference? Why do you believe in one fairy tale and not the other? Just because adults told you it was true and they scared you into believing it, at pain of death, at pain of burning in hell.
I'm not sure if it's fair to call it a 'fairy tale,' but I really loved 'Mulan,' the Disney film. It was my favorite. I guess it's not really a fairy tale, but you do get Eddie Murphy as a dragon.
I'm not sure if it's fair to call it a "fairy tale," but I really loved Mulan, the Disney film. It was my favorite. I guess it's not really a fairy tale, but you do get Eddie Murphy as a dragon.
What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
The idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale.
One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.
Related Authors
Ambrose Bierce Quotes
American
Journalist
Andy Rooney Quotes
American
Journalist
Ann Coulter Quotes
American
Journalist
Anna Quindlen Quotes
American
Journalist
Bill Vaughan Quotes
American
Journalist
Dave Barry Quotes
American
Journalist
Dennis Prager Quotes
American
Journalist
Erma Bombeck Quotes
American
Journalist
Fran Lebowitz Quotes
American
Journalist
George Will Quotes
American
Journalist
Glenn Beck Quotes
American
Journalist
Mark Shields Quotes
American
Journalist
Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
American
Journalist
Molly Ivins Quotes
American
Journalist
Rachel Maddow Quotes
American
Journalist
Walter Lippmann Quotes
American
Journalist