Daily Inspiration Quote by Vincent Canby

Canby is making a critic's case for fiction as more than entertainment and less than therapy: it is an instrument that sharpens life. The verbs do the work. "Reveals" suggests emotion is already there but occluded by habit and noise; fiction uncovers it without pretending to invent it. "Refines events" is the sly defense against the old charge that novels are lies. Life is messy, unedited, full of dead air. Fiction distills that mess into shapes we can finally recognize, not because it simplifies experience but because it gives it legible form.

"Locates importance" carries Canby's critic DNA. He's arguing that art is a system of attention. In a culture that treats significance like a trending topic, fiction trains us to rank our own moments, to notice what we would otherwise scroll past in ourselves. That line also smuggles in a rebuke to realism-as-recordkeeping: the point isn't to mirror the world, it's to make meaning appear.

Then comes the humility play: "methods...mysterious...varied". Canby, who spent a career evaluating craft, admits that the mechanism resists full explanation. It's an elegant way of protecting fiction from both academic overreach and marketplace reduction. You can talk about technique, but the alchemy remains.

The kicker is "intensifies the experience of living our own lives". Fiction isn't escape; it's amplification. After a great novel, you don't leave reality behind. You return to it with upgraded senses and a rearranged conscience, slightly more susceptible to feeling and therefore, in Canby's view, slightly more alive.