Truth vs. Fiction Quotes

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.

The reason why truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent.

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

George Orwell once wrote that a false belief sooner or later collides with physical reality, usually on a battlefield.

Generally, a lot of the things people think are made up are real, a lot of the things people think are real are made up, a lot of the things people think are spontaneous are cleverly faked, and a lot of the things people think are fake are spontaneous.

It's weird how people were always asking us, 'Are you real? Are you joking?' That seems like something Americans care about a lot. You can't answer the question 'Are you real?' If we're anything, we're documentary fiction.

As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

There is a sort of mythology that grows up about what happened, which is different from what really did happen.