Anne Lamott Quotes

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

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

I make it all up, and all of it is true.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

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 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.

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.

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

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

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.

I've never turned into a bee - I've never been chased by a mummy or met a ghost. But many of the ideas in my books are suggested by real life.

I'm not really gangsta. Not at all. I just write about them. It's fun to pretend, at least on paper. But in real life, not so much.

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

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

The moment there is imagination there is myth

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

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

All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

In a story, you can turn to the front and begin again and everyone lives once more. That doesn't work in real life. And I love my real people the most.