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.
“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”
Letter to critic Stephen Pile, Sunday Times (London) (January 18, 1981)
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Graham Greene 164
English writer, playwright and literary critic 1904–1991Related quotes
“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
"The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 60
It All Adds Up (1994)
“The most original novelist now writing in English.”
V. S. Pritchett, quoted in Time, April 4, 1955. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,866174-2,00.html.
Criticism
On attempts at keeping a journal, as quoted in Stylus (20 December 2005)
“That is why I write - to try to turn sadness into longing, solitude into remembrance.”
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept