Bob Greene Quotes

You know what you are best at, and writing is just not my thing, but I like it.

It's not a college degree that makes a writer. The great thing is to have a story to tell.

Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.

Fiction creating reality.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.

Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it's become the most real thing.

The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?

I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don't warn people beforehand. That's why I'm a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself.

Every author that creates is a liar;literature is a lie,but from that lie, a recreation of reality is born. Therefore, recreating reality is one of the fundaments of creation.

For me, it doesn't matter whether it's a comedy, a Western or horror. As long as you've got a good story to tell, the genre almost doesn't matter. As an actor playing the role, it's all rooted in reality.

I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.

Max Allan Collins blends fact and fiction like no other writer.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

Blue uniforms are real. Cops are a social fiction

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

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

The only real people are the people who never existed.

I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?

... if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it?