We have always had storytellers and makers of fiction since the days of the cave-man. There is an eternal impulse in human nature to enliven the actual working life by the invention of tales of another kind of life, recognizable by its likeness to ordinary life, but so arranged that things happen more dramatically and pleasingly — which indeed is the world in a glorified and idealized form.
—John Buchan, Scottish writer and politician, The Novel and Fairy Tale, 1931

Posted on April 9, 2004 at 11:30 AM

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