“I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant’s brilliant non-fiction about humankind’s tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar’s Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it.” WorldShouldHumansChildrenLongRealCultureNaturalHuman BeingsAnimalFictionMoralNovelBraveBrilliantTreatedStorytellingPreservesComplexityHumankindNatural WorldNon FictionLamentVisceralDebutAmbivalentJaguars Author:John Burnham Schwartz
“What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.” ShouldFirstsHumansEnoughStoriesHandsSeemsEyeAbleHuman BeingsFictionSituationReaderDrawsCleverDisplayImaginaryCompetentGood StoryHallmarkPsych Author:H. L. Mencken
“I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.” ThinkingHumansHuman BeingsFictionNarrative Author:Paul Auster
“Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.” HumansChallengesHuman BeingsFictionTeachingEmpathySkinsMiracle Author:Hugh Howey
“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.” WritingHumansStillsPlaySeemsRememberSufferingHouseHuman BeingsFictionFourMiddleMaterialsCreaturesEdgesCornersInstanceAttachmentTornSpidersHookedMaterial ThingsSpunShakespeare's Plays Author:Virginia Woolf
“I would love to see what's going to happen with science fiction with peoples' heads, because we still have people running around in the year 2050 or 2100 or 2200 and they have incredible technology and you see the effects: laser beams and rays and beaming down and beaming up. Incredible technical things happening, but everybody is still running around jealous, fighting, whacking, cheating. There's got to be something going on! Some kind of change. I'd like to see something starting to happen in that area, with the psychology of the human being and how that changed.” PeopleYearsHumansKindStillsHappensRunningFightingHuman BeingsFictionTechnologyPsychologyEffectsChangedHappeningsAreasDown AndScience FictionIncrediblesStartingThings HappenCheatingJealousRaysBeamLasers Author:Leslie Nielsen
“The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists.” HumansFeelingsLightTurnsEvilStarsHuman BeingsRaceHalfFictionSkyMoralityPureDisappearHuman RaceVoidParticlesEgotismVictorianIcyGood Evil Author:H. P. Lovecraft
“Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.” HumansHuman BeingsFictionReaderComplexesMainstream Author:Bharati Mukherjee
“I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.” ThinkingHumansIdeasCharacterHuman BeingsFictionSubjectsEssaysDidactic Author:David Foster Wallace
“The character is a piece of fiction. You are yourself, however, and that makes you interesting, because you're alive and you're a human being.” HumansCharacterHuman BeingsInterestingFictionPiecesAlive Author:Christopher Reeve
“I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.” ThinkingWorldWritingHumansStoriesRealityWould BeSocialHuman BeingsExistenceFictionRealisticSurprisingRealistic Fiction Author:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a tremendous compassion for him, which has grown over the years. A certain kind of pity for him also in that he was so unrealised as a human being, so dogged, and so shut-off from people in many ways. You know, I've been writing another book, and it's another non-fiction autobiographical work, kind of a compliment to "Winter Journal", and it's just finished.” PeopleThinkingKnowsWayWritingYearsHumansKindBookEndsDreamCertainFatherHuman BeingsFictionCompassionWinterFinishedPityComplimentJournalNon Fiction Author:Paul Auster
“Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)” WritingFirstsHumansHardHuman BeingsFictionImpossibleReaderProtagonists Author:Charles Stross