In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (1991)
Context: I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people.
“Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”
"A Conversation With Roger Zelazny" (8 April 1978), talking with Terry Dowling and Keith Curtis in Science Fiction Vol. 1, #2 (June 1978)
or "am I somehow influencing reality around me?"
Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)
Letter to critic Stephen Pile, Sunday Times (London) (January 18, 1981)
The Vices of Morality: Immoral Amorality (p. 109)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)
“Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.”
This may have arisen as a paraphrase of statements found in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "An Absurd Reasoning", or one found in The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction 1935-1960 (1962) edited by John Cruikshank, p. 218
Disputed
“I didn't lie, I was writing fiction with my mouth."
Homer Simpson”
As quoted in the "Translator's Introduction" to The Deer and the Cauldron: A Martial Arts Novel, Book 1, trans. John Minford (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. xi
On being told that her writing is energeticin “In a rare interview, Elena Ferrante describes the writing process behind the Neapolitan novels” https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-elena-ferrante-interview-20180517-htmlstory.html in Los Angeles Times (2018 May 17)
