
"Clancy Speaks Again, Briefly" (12 February 2000) http://www.clancyfaq.com/Clancy%20Speaks%20Again%20Briefly.htm
2000s
Jokingly to news reporters. Speech at the National Press Club (18 May 1999).
1990s
"Clancy Speaks Again, Briefly" (12 February 2000) http://www.clancyfaq.com/Clancy%20Speaks%20Again%20Briefly.htm
2000s
God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth (1989) YouTube video of the lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBEIeRSLb8k
Context: It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead — I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction. Certainly it has given consolation, but consolation is not the right thing! Consolation is opium. It keeps you unaware of the reality, and life is flowing past you so quickly — seventy years will be gone soon. Anybody who gives you a belief system is your enemy, because the belief system becomes the barrier for your eyes, you cannot see the truth. The very desire to find the truth disappears. But in the beginning it is bitter if all your belief systems are taken away from you. The fear and anxiety which you have been suppressing for millennia, which is there, very alive, will surface immediately. No God can destroy it, only the search for truth and the experience of truth — not a belief — is capable of healing all your wounds, of making you a whole being. And the whole person is the holy person to me.
“The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”
Attributed to an interview on Larry King Live; also quoted in Quotable Quotes (1997) edited by Deborah Deford
Attributed variant: The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
Clancy here expresses an idea evoked in similar statements made by others, all derived from the orignial made by Lord Byron:
Lord Byron: Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
Mark Twain: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't.
G. K. Chesterton: Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
Leo Rosten: Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense. (attributed)
1990s
“The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.”
Interview with Weird Tales (24 May 2007) http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/2007/05/24/george-rr-martin-on-magic-vs-science/
Context: I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep. I know there are elements in the field, particularly in science fiction, who feel that the differences are very profound, but I do not agree with that analysis. I think for me it is a matter of the furnishings. An elf or an alien may in some ways fulfill the same function, as a literary trope. It’s almost a matter of flavor. The ice cream can be chocolate or it can be strawberry, but it’s still ice cream. The real difference, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction.
Source: Weirdos From Another Planet: Calvin & Hobbes Series: Book Six: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection
What Every Man Wants in a Woman: 10 Essentials for Growing Deeper in Love
Charisma House
Lake Mary, Fla.
December 2004
978-1591855576
124084413
http://books.google.com/books?id=blrTAAAACAAJ