Arundhati Roy Quotes

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

I make it all up, and all of it is true.

there are elements of truth in all great fiction

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

All stories are true.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

Every fiction has its base in fact.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

When I set out to write 'Sanctus,' all I wanted to do was craft a piece of high quality entertainment.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.