Art & Creativity Quote by Cornelia Funke

Funkes line flatters the reader, but it also quietly diagnoses a modern hunger: we crave people who are legible. Fictional characters arrive pre-illuminated. We get their interior monologues, their formative wounds, their private rationalizations. Real people make us do the work, and even then they can revise the story mid-sentence. A novel, by design, cannot. So the odd intimacy Funke points to isnt really about reality versus unreality; its about access.

The phrasing "Every reader knows" is a small spell of community-building. It turns a solitary act into a shared secret and casts the sensation as inevitable, not embarrassing. That matters because the feeling can sound like escapism or social failure. Funke reframes it as a readers competence: you arent delusional, youre responsive to craft.

Subtextually, the quote defends the moral and emotional seriousness of childrens and young adult literature, a space Funke is closely associated with and that is often patronized as lesser. If characters can feel "more real", then the stakes of their choices can shape a readers ethics and self-concept as powerfully as any so-called realistic experience. Its also a sly nod to why her own work (Inkheart especially) obsesses over books as portals: reading doesnt just distract from life; it reorganizes what counts as real inside it.

Context: late-20th-century storytelling, where media saturated lives and curated selves make actual humans harder to read. Funke points out the paradox: the invented person can be the one who finally feels knowable.