Wentworth Dillon Quotes

Fiction is most powerful when it contains most truth; and there is little truth we get so true as that which we find in fiction.

There's a fine line between fiction and non-fiction and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979

History is an agreed-upon fiction.

What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.

Fiction intended to please, should resemble truth as much as possible.

You are a slow learner, Winston." "How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four." "Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.

The camera lies all the time; lies 24 times/second.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Tell the truth, but lead so improbable a life that the truth will never be believed.

Yet, I had nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing.

And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.

I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.

This is a work of fiction. Still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible worlds is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe, it's not as fictional as we think.

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.

Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.

Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but...

There is an old saying: In history nothing is true but the names and dates. In fiction everything is true but the names and dates. The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.

In a social media age, it seems that everyone lives in their own reality and that when you give consideration to Newt Gingrich, he exists in an alternate reality, at some level, where the things he says are so diametrically opposed to the record.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.