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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

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.
BEN H. WINTERS

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

Fiction Prophesy Special
A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.
BEN H. WINTERS

Blood Blue Depression
It is really something, the extent to which we allow ourselves to live without thinking of things that we know, in the abstract, are bad, and are going on right now, somewhere far away.
BEN H. WINTERS

Away Far Thinking World
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
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
There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
BEN H. WINTERS

Detectives Littles Novelty
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
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
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 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
I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people’s experiences.
BEN H. WINTERS

People Responsibility Thinking
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
The membrane between where we are right now and a very different reality, is so much thinner than we like to think. Things can go back, and things can go to the side, and things can go to places where we might not even have been on guard that they might go.
BEN H. WINTERS

Reality Support Thinking
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

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.

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Popular Authors

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