“Fiction is an improvement on life”

“Has difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction. This girl is a liar. Expect Improvement next term.”

“Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up.But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word”

“Fiction is life by design.”

“...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.”

“If standard of living is your major objective, quality of life almost never improves, but if quality of life is your number one objective, your standard of living almost always improves.”