Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

At fourteen you don't need sickness or death for tragedy.

—Jessamyn West

Every arrival foretells a leave-taking, every birth a death. Yet each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should surprise us.

—Jessamyn West

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

—Jessamyn West

Sex and religion are bordering states. They use the same vocabulary, share like ecstasies, and often serve as a substitute for one another.

—Jessamyn West

You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood—and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.

—Jessamyn West

The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

—Frank Herbert

The good thing about writing fiction is that you can get back at people. I've gotten back at lawyers, prosecutors, judges, law professors, and politicians. I just line 'em up and shoot 'em.

—John Grisham

If a historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.

—Pierre Bayle