Denise Mina Quotes

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

I'm an avid reader myself, and what any one reader accesses at any one time is very powerful and personal to them. Clearly you can't even begin to touch that. A novel is a singular vision, and then a myriad of readers have their own experience of that.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

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.

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.

Fiction isn't memoir and memoir isn't fiction.

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

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.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.

The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

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

Sometimes the facts can get in the way of the telling of a good story. But they don't get in the way of the truth.

'House of Cards' is aiming for truth, not accuracy.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way

there are elements of truth in all great fiction

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.