“… it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.”
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Sarah Caudwell 2
English barrister and writer 1939–2000Related quotes


letter, 19 April 1951, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

Nobel Lecture (2010)

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, pp. 43-44
Context: Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”
New York Times (July 28, 1976).

Performance at the L.A. Improv (1977) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH7crqRvhhc