Oriana Fallaci Quotes

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

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

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

If I ever wrote a book, people would never believe it.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

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

My favourite author as a child and teenager, and who I still re-read now, is K. M. Peyton. She writes very truthfully; sometimes I'm not sure if I've actually done things or just experienced them in her books.

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

It might sound glib, but in a sense, as an actor I'm a journalist and a psychologist recording life and truth.

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

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.

There's a satisfaction I get from writing fiction that I will never get from screenwriting.

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.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.