There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.

There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.