Truth in Fiction Quotes

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

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

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

The best angles and the best stories always hinge on reality. Throughout the history of WWE, all the best storylines have a little touch of what's real behind them.

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.

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

A novel must show how the world truly is. Somehow, reveals the true source of our actions.

I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they're telling the truth. The fact is they're using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they're telling the truth about the human being- what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

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.

Something I found while writing 'Alice & Oliver' - a book that is unquestionably a work of fiction, but which also borrows details from my own life - is that writing the truth often requires invention and imagination.

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.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.

[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.

Fairly tales are myths, and myths are only myths because there's a grain of truth in them.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

...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.

The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.