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I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone’s mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

Ben H. Winters

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
BEN H. WINTERS

Fiction Prophesy Special
I think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we’re interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.
BEN H. WINTERS

Culture Interested Lives Personal Politics Sports
It is part of what makes America great. That tradition of the free press, and also the tradition of this highly competitive market for investigative journalism. We’re seeing, there’s no question, that we’re seeing a renaissance of that.
BEN H. WINTERS

Country Journalism Renaissance
We think, “Well, what are you gonna do?” In a way, that little instinct, that “What are you gonna do?” is the most dangerous thing in the world.
BEN H. WINTERS

Dangerous Instinct Little Think Way
A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.
BEN H. WINTERS

Blood Blue Depression
There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
BEN H. WINTERS

Detectives Littles Novelty
That one lesson that African American communities have learned over the centuries in America is that you can’t just take for granted that things will steadily get better and better and better until they’re great. It is fits and starts. It is backward and forward.
BEN H. WINTERS

Community Country Get Better
I think that if there is a great gift that this [Donald Trump] election gave us, is this sort of sense of vigilance, the sense that we have to remain on guard. We have to support our free press.
BEN H. WINTERS

Gift Great Press Sense Support Think
The election of Donald Trump is, to me, this very clownish personality with no political experience, who had literally been using fascist slogans in his campaign. It had seemed so impossible.
BEN H. WINTERS

Campaign Personality Political
Even after he was elected, and even now, it still feels impossible. It felt like we had fallen into this wormhole of history.
BEN H. WINTERS

Even Fallen Feel History Impossible Now
We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.
BEN H. WINTERS

Each Other Everything Pretend Things Treat
A book is not a tweet. A book is not a half-hour television show. A book requires for both reader and writer sustained discipline attention. It asks you to immerse yourself in something and really deeply feel it.
BEN H. WINTERS

Attention Book Discipline Half Require
We forget the conditions – not only in slavery – but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today’s incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things.
BEN H. WINTERS

Educational Long Opportunity
We spend so much time, these days, on forms of literature that don’t rise to be literature, and I’m speaking about Twitter posts and quick and hot takes on different websites. We sort of zoom from thing to thing like a hummingbird.
BEN H. WINTERS

Different Hot Post Zoom
One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people’s lives, with real individuals.
BEN H. WINTERS

Issues Moral Play Real
Our political divides have become our personal divides.
BEN H. WINTERS

Become Divide Personal Political

I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone’s mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

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I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone’s mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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