CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
You've heard of "walking encyclopedias," but it turns out that every person is a walking unwritten novel bound in cloth and haberdashery. We constitute a circulating library that covers the earth's surface. That's because we're all weaving an extravaganza of fictions as we sum up and recite to ourselves our pasts and futures. From Straws and Prayer-books by James Branch Cabell, 1924.
Apparently, nothing written about Ireland can be called fiction, since "Ireland is an unreal place anyway, where the unlikely seems to happen more often than anything else." From Mrs. O' by Claude Marie Forde, 1958.
Fiction "is an absolute necessity so that civilization continues to exist, renewing and preserving in us the best of what is human" (Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel lecture, "In Praise of Reading and Fiction," Dec. 7, 2010).