Life & Wisdom Quote by Ralph Ellison

Ellison is arguing for a particular kind of honesty: the sort you earn, not the sort you assume you already possess. “Good fiction” isn’t a flight from the world; it’s a technology for extracting it. The sting is in the second clause. Reality, he suggests, is scarce not because there isn’t enough of it, but because most of what passes for “real” is pre-packaged: cliché, ideology, sentimentality, the easy story we tell ourselves to avoid the harder one.

Coming from the author of Invisible Man, that scarcity has a racial and political charge. Ellison wrote in a century where Black life was relentlessly narrated by others, flattened into sociological case studies or moral fables. To say reality is “difficult to come by” is to call out the machinery that makes certain experiences illegible, and to insist that the novelist’s job is to fight for perception itself. He’s also pushing back against a naive realism that treats “the real” as mere documentation. Ellison’s “real” is the felt complexity of a life: contradiction, improvisation, the way identity is performed under pressure.

The line works because it reverses a common hierarchy. We’re taught fiction is fake and reality is obvious; Ellison flips it. Reality is the elusive thing, and fiction, done well, is how you get closer. It’s a quietly combative credo: imagination isn’t an escape hatch, it’s a tool for seeing past the scripts.