Laura Riding Quotes

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Sometimes a novelist can get closer to the truth than the historian can.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

Like all writers, I draw from life as I know it; but it's a refracted kind of reality, and none of it is factually true.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Poetry lies its way to 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.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

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 …

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

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

This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.

When reading fiction, we cannot automatically assume that what we read is fact.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.