Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles de Lint

De Lint’s line lands like a sly elbow to the ribs of anyone who treats “fact” and “fiction” as warring kingdoms with a hard border patrol. The joke is bureaucratic: the difference is “about fifteen pages in the dictionary,” meaning the gap is literally an editorial span, a matter of filing and definition rather than a metaphysical chasm. He’s not denying reality so much as mocking our confidence that we can cleanly sort experience into two bins and be done with it.

The subtext carries a writer’s impatience with gatekeepers of seriousness. “Most people call fiction” hints at consensus as a flimsy authority: if the crowd agrees something is “just a story,” they feel licensed to dismiss it. De Lint pushes back by implying that fiction is another way facts travel - emotionally, morally, psychologically - often more effectively than reportage. The dictionary, symbol of official meaning, becomes the punchline: language doesn’t merely describe truth, it adjudicates it, and those rulings are human, contingent, revised edition by edition.

Context matters here. De Lint built a career in urban fantasy, a genre that thrives on collisions between the mundane and the mythic. In that world, the supernatural isn’t escapism; it’s a lens for the real pressures of cities, belonging, trauma, and hope. The quote is a defense of imaginative literature as a truth-telling technology: not accurate in the documentary sense, but accurate in the way it maps how it feels to live.