Wallace Stegner Quotes

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

All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean.

All stories are true,” Skarpi said. “But this one really happened, if that’s what you mean.” He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. “More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.

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

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

People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens.

Over the years, I have come to realize that no matter how satisfying fiction is, it becomes that much better when it actually happened.

As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.

All stories are true.

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

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

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

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.

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

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

I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

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

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

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

True stories are way more interesting.

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

Let me tell you what, reality is better than any script you could ever write.

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