Fictional Truth Quotes

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

There are two kinds of truth. There are real truths and there are made up truths.

He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.

If the moral good of fiction stems mainly from a habit of mind it inculcates in the reader, styles are neither good nor bad, and to describe some fictional enterprises as false is pointless.

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

I'm an unashamed realist, and actually, I try to make whatever the script is the reality of that situation, even though it's fictional.

The songs are not meant to be real life. They're meant to have a psychic - rather than a factual - bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel - they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination.

Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.

In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.

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.

Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth.

I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.

… fiction may be admitted to vouch for the genius of nations, while history has nothing to offer that is entitled to credit

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.

Every author that creates is a liar;literature is a lie,but from that lie, a recreation of reality is born. Therefore, recreating reality is one of the fundaments of creation.

The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.

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

...Don't let me ever hear you say, 'I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth.' Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of 'literature'? That means fiction, too, stupid.

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.