Jules Feiffer 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.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

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.

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.

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use.

I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

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

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

My life isn't very racy or exciting so I make things up, tell stories. I like telling stories.

If you're a fan of anything I do, I'm always telling a story. I'm into that - I like it when you don't know if it was true or not.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

Every fiction has its base in fact.

If you're making it up, make it up good. And then believe in what you made up.

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.'

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

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

I always say show me a storyteller who doesn't embellish, and I'll show you a bad one.

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

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

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