J. B. Priestley Quotes

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

What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

You find that all men are successes or failures. Success is the stamp of truth. I will say all men who fail to place their feet on the dome of facts do so by not sieving all truth and throwing the faulty to one side.

I have always found fact infinitely more interesting than myths and falsehoods.

Knowledge goes hand and hand with truth.

Facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie.

The beginning of all wisdom is recognition of facts

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

From fiction, you do not get to learn much because it is only imagination. Whereas, from non-fiction, people can understand and learn from the realities it covers.

The facts don't always reveal the truth, but the truth always reveals the facts.

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.

there are elements of truth in all great fiction

The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

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

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

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

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".