Life & Wisdom Quote by Terry Goodkind

"It allows you to say things that sound very dramatic and get away with it. If you had characters in modern fiction say the same things as they're driving down the street in an Oldsmobile they'd sound ludicrous!"

Terry Goodkind, Writer

About this Quote

Fantasy’s greatest cheat code isn’t dragons or magic systems; it’s permission. Goodkind is bluntly describing how secondary worlds function as a kind of rhetorical sanctuary, where characters can speak in heightened registers - prophecy, destiny, moral absolutes - without triggering the reader’s built-in cringe detector. Drop those same lines into a scene with a suburban car brand like an Oldsmobile and the spell breaks, because modern realism carries an expectation of casualness, irony, and psychological self-awareness. Contemporary people don’t usually talk like they’re carved into a monument. When they do, we suspect manipulation, parody, or a bad screenplay.

The intent here is craft advice disguised as a joke: genre is a contract. Fantasy invites the dramatic because its settings are already symbolic, already “about” something larger than literal life. Castles, swords, and invented histories act like stage lighting, making big declarations feel earned. The Oldsmobile is doing important cultural work as shorthand for the everyday and slightly unglamorous; it punctures grandeur with the hum of normality. Goodkind’s punchline is really a warning about tonal mismatch: the same sentence can be profound or ridiculous depending on the world that holds it.

Subtextually, there’s also a defense of earnestness. Fantasy has long been mocked as juvenile precisely because it dares to be sincere. Goodkind flips that: sincerity isn’t the problem; context is. The genre doesn’t just “allow” drama - it engineers the conditions where drama can land cleanly.

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About the Author

Terry Goodkind (January 11, 1948 - September 17, 2020) was a Writer from USA.

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