“Fiction fosters empathy among readers by putting them in a position to consider deeply someone’s history, hopes, and ambitions…”
On how fiction might differ from her journalist works in “Motherhood and Migration: An Interview with Vanessa Hua on ‘A River of Stars’” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/motherhood-and-migration-an-interview-with-vanessa-hua-on-a-river-of-stars/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2018 Sep 13)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Vanessa Hua 4
American journalist and writerRelated quotes
Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 9, “Science Fiction—A Personal View” (p. 172)
Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)
“But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.”
Source: The Library at Night
Oxford Companion to Children's Literature: "Charles Hamilton" (pages 235-7)
Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)
Paris Review Interview (1986)
Context: You ask if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction.
Oxford Companion to Children's Literature: "Charles Hamilton" (pages 235-7)