Mark Twain Quotes

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

Everything in a story should be credible.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

People say I make up wild stories. But all I have to do is write down stuff that really happens.

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

If it's fiction, then it better be true.

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

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

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

My action follows my characters. If a character is a cop, you cannot be posing all the time, you cannot fly off the roof because it doesn't make any sense - it's not practical.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

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

Truth is so much more interesting than the fiction we're used to.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

All stories should have some honesty and truth in them, otherwise you're just playing about.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

When I write for kids, I have to make sure they know what can't happen. They have to know it's a fantasy. But when I write for adults, they have to think it's real. Every detail has to be real or they won't buy it.