Azar Nafisi Quotes

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.

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

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

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

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.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

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

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

If I feel like I haven't really tapped into the essence of the story when I do an assignment, I may revisit it on my own, and that's when I feel freer to add my imagination. But I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.

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

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

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

Good fiction creates its own reality.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

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

My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like - but truer than the literal truth.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

I try to find the picture, not create it.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'