A Quote by Steven Saylor
We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination.
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Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
Fiction allows us to see the world from the point of view of someone else and there has been quite a lot of neurological research that shows reading novels is actually good for you. It embeds you in society and makes you think about other people. People are certainly better at all sorts of things if they can hold a novel in their heads. It is quite a skill, but if you can't do it then you're missing out on something in life. I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.
No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through. ... That is why people read: to have experiences.
The mind is very wild. The human experience is full of unpredictability and paradox, joys and sorrows, successes and failures. We can't escape any of these experiences in the vast terrain of our existence. It is part of what makes life grand-and it is also why our minds take us on such a crazy ride. If we can train ourselves through meditation to be more open and more accepting toward the wild arc of our experience, if we can lean into the difficulties of life and the ride of our minds, we can become more settled and relaxed amid whatever life brings us.
I hear what many of you are saying: We don’t have the time, we are busy. Well Nobody Has Time, Everyone Is Busy. In the time it took you to read this post, your life just got a minute shorter. That is precisely why we read (and why some of us write): because life is short and finite, we want more, and literature is the distillation of all those lives we will not lead.
I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we're not alone - for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone - but also to help us celebrate our joys. That's why so many people I know who've gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.
Eternal life does not violate the laws of physics. After all, we only die because of one word: "error." The longer we live, the more errors there are that are made by our bodies when they read our genes. That means cells get sluggish. The body doesn't function as well as it could, which is why the skin ages. Then organs eventually fail, so that's why we die.
Someone once said, People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. They forgot one other option: Some people come only to give us their contact information, let us know that we really need to get together sometime, and why don’t we give them a call?
There's only one why. You only have one why, and your why is fully formed by the time you're 17, 18 or 19years old, maybe even earlier. The rest of your life are simply opportunities to either live in or out of balance and the career choices we make and the decisions we make in our lives either put us in balance with our why, which makes us happy, fulfilled and inspired. Or it puts us out of our why, which makes us frustrated, stressed out and sometimes we fail.
My biggest bits of advice are, write as much as you can, finish what you start, get a thick skin, don't take crap from anyone, but also live your life and have fun. The stereotype of a writer holed up alone all day is really unhelpful. You can't write real people and real emotion if you don't let yourself experience them.
Philip Larkin didn't write for several years before his life ended. And when he was asked why he didn't write, he said the muse deserted him. And when I read that, it really had a profound effect upon me, sort of scared me. So that's why I think I have no right to assume that some thought is going to come... But I think, in my imagination, if it is it, there will probably be something else I'm interested in.
Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you.
People lose it when I say this, but I'm a novelist who doesn't read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I'm also a game writer who doesn't play games - I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.
Looking back, I realise it wasn't only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn't knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn't they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them?
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