The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

[...]

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading believe every word of it. Finally, when we are done with it, we may find – if it's a good novel – that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But its' very hard to say just what we learned, how we are changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Introduction' in The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. xvi

The true measure of life is memory

I for my part offer the following interpretation: the true measure of life is memory. Looking back, it traverses the whole of life like lightning. As fast as one can turn back a few pages, it has travelled from the next village to the place where the traveller took the decision to set out. Those for whom life has become transformed into writing can only read the story backwards. That is the only way in which they encounter themselves, and only thus – by fleeing from the present – can they understand life.

Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (Verso, 2003) p. 112

Do your own bit of saving

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) p. 112

The pores in the face of life

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But once he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) pp. 108-109

Augmenting reality

Far from producing only weakened images of reality – shadows, as in the Platonic treatment of the eikõn in painting or writing – literary works depict reality by augmenting it with meanings that themselves depend upon the virtues of abbreviation, saturation, and culmination, so strikingly illustrated by emplotment.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 80

Literature is analysis after the event

Literature is analysis after the event.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p.210

The power of poetry

This was the first time that her soul was charmed by the power of poetry, which shows us the lot of man so truthfully and so sympathetically and with so much love for that which is good that we ourselves become better persons and understand life more fully than before, and hope and trust that good may always prevail in the life of man.

Halldór Laxness, Independent People (Harvill Press, 2001) p. 244

The ultimate meaning

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 259

Written truth

But if an individual truth is the only one that a book can contain, I might as well accept it and write my truth. The book of my memory? No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form. The book of my desires? Those also are true only when their impulse acts independently of my conscious will. The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 181

Beginnings

But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest – for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both – must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 153

Reading

"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead..."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 72

Shattered time and literature

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 8