Nicholson Baker Quotes

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

Lying and art are very allied. But after you lie, you get to the truth.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

Writers tell more truths, and more lies, than most.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

Poets tell many lies.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important. We shouldn't stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind, and of the imagination.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.

My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.'

Some music comes from a real place; some music comes from your imagination. It's difficult to find out what's real and what's not, especially with the gangster stuff.

Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really.

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

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

The really best acting is children in a playground or in a backyard. They're just lost in their imagination. The backyard isn't a pirate ship or a jungle, in the same way that the soundstage isn't Shambala.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

I'm not really gangsta. Not at all. I just write about them. It's fun to pretend, at least on paper. But in real life, not so much.

Fiction lags after truth.

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

You can be very honest without telling the truth, at least in art.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.