Quotes About Fiction

Fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle the truth. And autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked up and rearranged to invent a fictive self.

A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

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

I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.

What is not in nature can never be true.

Fairy tales lie just as much as statistics do, but sometimes you can find a grain of truth in them.

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

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

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

I don't believe that narrative works when it's trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth.

In fear we are acting on fiction and in love we are acting on truth

The truth is stranger than fiction . . . and often more incriminating.

A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be

Error is always more busy than truth.

There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

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.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.

Those who say truth is stranger than fiction have wasted their time on poorly written fiction.