Anne Enright Quotes

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

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

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

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

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

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

I make it all up, and all of it is true.

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

When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.

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

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.

All stories are true.

Writers tell more truths, and more lies, than most.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Truth is not always injured by fiction.

Every fiction has its base in fact.

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.