Michael Morpurgo Quotes

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

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.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

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

When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

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.

Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I have an obligation as a writer to tell a story as interestingly as possible, but with integrity and not inserting false drama... I'm looking to be subtle, but being a wordsmith does not interest me - I want to communicate.

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

I want my fiction to seem real.

My thing is to try to tell the truth as honestly as possible. For me, the weight is, how can I tell the truth through fiction, the best that I can?

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.