Jennifer Haigh Quotes

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

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

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

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

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

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

Literature invents its own rules.

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

When I'm writing, I like to have a tiny bit of fact and then exaggerate it and turn it into something more people could relate to.

If I feel like I haven't really tapped into the essence of the story when I do an assignment, I may revisit it on my own, and that's when I feel freer to add my imagination. But I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.

Sci-fi's great, but you don't have to hit people over the head with it when you're making a social comment. It just inherently exists within the fabric of the story.

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

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

There is a real connection between Philosopy and fiction.

I'm just a story teller.

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.