“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

—  Oscar Wilde , The Importance of Being Earnest

Miss Prism, Act II
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." by Oscar Wilde?
Oscar Wilde photo
Oscar Wilde 812
Irish writer and poet 1854–1900

Related quotes

Bernhard Schlink photo

“Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily..”

Bernhard Schlink book The Reader

Source: The Reader

“It didn't fit her ideas of who was bad, and who was good, and what was a happy ending, and what wasn't.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

Nora Roberts photo

“Happily ever after?"
"If justice doesn't triumph and love doesn't make the circle in entertainment fiction, what's the point? Real life sucks too often.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Angels Fall

Mark Twain photo

“The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Freeman Dyson photo

“A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Disturbing the Universe (1979)
Context: A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad. <!-- Pt. 1, Ch. 4

“Science fiction encourages us to explore… all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.”

Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930–1999) Novelist, editor

As quoted in The Faces of Science Fiction (1984) by Patti Perret

Orson Scott Card photo

“What you are is a man who means to be good, and undo the bad he’s done, and that’s as good as any man ever gets.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Alvin Journeyman (1995), Chapter 13.

David Benioff photo

“What's the good news?
-Pardon?
-You said the bad news is we're going the wrong way.
-There isn't any good news. Just because there's bad news doesn't mean there's good news, too.”

David Benioff book City of Thieves

Source: City of Thieves

Gregory Benford photo

“A science fiction writer is—or should be—constrained by what is, or logically might be. That can mean simple fidelity to facts (which, in science, are always more important than theories—though Lord knows the two help shape each other, undermining the convenient, complacent separation of observer and observed). To me it also means heeding the authentic, the actual and concrete. Bad fiction uses the glossy generality; good writing needs the smattering of detail, the unrelenting busy mystery of the real.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Afterword to Exposures, p. 246
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Jack McDevitt photo

“Fiction is unlike reality because it has an end, a conclusion, which allows the characters to stroll happily, or perhaps simply more wisely, out through the climax into the epilogue. But life is a tapestry. It has no satisfactory end. There are simply periods of acceleration and delay, victory and frustration, seasoned with periodic jolts of reality.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 44 (p. 412)

Related topics