Top 100 Quotes About Fact And Fiction
#1. The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures
I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road.
Paul Theroux
#2. I'm a fan of short horror fiction ... in fact, the most memorable horror I've read is of the short variety ... but I have a hard time pulling it off myself.
George Stephen
#3. There is some fiction, in all fact; and some fact, in all fiction.
T. Scott McLeod
#4. the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact.
Whitley Strieber
#5. That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.
Anthony Holden
#6. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open
the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
Jeanette Winterson
#7. As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
Charles De Lint
#9. I am a storyteller, spiraling fantasy and reality into mystical tales. That eerie space between fact and fiction, where only the brightest light can scare the shadows - you will find me there.
Sara Frost
#10. People want movies to be one thing or another; they want it be fact or fiction.
Laurel Nakadate
#11. There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision.
Henry Petroski
#12. The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.
Lindsay Wagner
#13. Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn't like it, it is it.
Douglas Adams
#14. Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them.
Alan Moore
#15. It's perfect. Blurred lines; it's when fact and fiction become indiscernible. Fantasy and reality fade into a color of grey yarn and you become tangled up in it and can't escape into the world of black and white you desperately need as proof of the reality of life itself.
Scott Hildreth
#16. In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.
Adam Sisman
#17. Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.
Halldor Laxness
#18. The fact that we die is one of the more interesting things that happen to us. Fiction ought to be about bottom lines, and that's as bottom-line as you can get.
Stanley Elkin
#19. Collins masterfully blends fact and fiction ... transcends the historical thriller.
Jeffery Deaver
#20. But I hate things all fiction ... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric - and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.
Lord Byron
#21. Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.
Arthur Smith
#22. Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.
Carol Alt
#23. I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.
Flannery O'Connor
#25. Max Allan Collins blends fact and fiction like no other writer.
Andrew Vachss
#26. There's no mistaking the fact that some of the best longform fiction out there now is in American television. 'The Wire' and 'Deadwood' and 'The Sopranos.'
Kevin Barry
#27. The mere suggestion of fame and fortune casts a glamour all its own. It is rather alarming how quickly people will turn someone else's fiction into fact in order to support their own fictions of themselves.
Libba Bray
#28. On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.
George Stephen
#29. In life, you will hear many fantastical and astounding things, what is important is sorting out the fact from the fiction.
T.B. Christensen
#30. When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.
Nalo Hopkinson
#31. What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh - and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.
Richard Dawkins
#32. In American fiction, belief is like that. Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.
Paul Elie
#33. I keep warning and warning, and nobody seems willing to listen. One of these days someone is going to wake up to the fact that I'm serious when I say never to attack my sister without looking over your shoulder for me. (Rhoan)
Keri Arthur
#34. What if most of the technologies readers and cinemagoers are presented with in bestselling books and blockbuster movies are not science fiction, but science fact? What if they currently exist on the planet, but are suppressed from the masses?
James Morcan
#35. Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story.
Malcolm Cowley
#36. I didn't want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it's rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.
Jeanette Winterson
#37. I'm not sure what's more worrying. The list of demands or the fact he seems unaware the French stopped using francs in the last century and that Africa is a continent?" - Jerome
Jamie Scallion
#38. Listen to others as if they are telling you the truth, ask questions when you aren't clear, and allow others the room to have different feelings than you. No more assigning hidden motives, prejudging and cutting people off before separating fact from fiction.
Rhonda Britten
#39. Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking 'muck' across the floor of fact.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#40. I nodded. I was ready. In fact I was so ready that if he didn't do something soon, if he didn't touch me in the next five seconds, it was very possible I might die. Right there on the bed. Still a virgin.
Sarah Alderson
#41. I've never been much for self-revelation. In two decades of public life, I always approached the limelight with extreme caution. Not that I kept my personal life off-limits; rather, the personal life I put on display was a blend of fact and fiction.
James McGreevey
#42. Allow me to introduce myself,
the name is Brown, Jane Brown,
and I am the greatest detective the world
has ever seen. I'm known to solve multiple cases,
on any given day, without even breaking a sweat.
In fact, I am working on one now.
A.J. DeJong
#43. It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.
Paul Di Filippo
#44. It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray ... We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.
Winston Churchill
#45. Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.
G.K. Chesterton
#46. The fact is that roughly two-thirds of all fiction purchases are made because the consumer is already familiar with the author.
Donald Maass
#48. But as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction.
Clive Barker
#49. Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.
Muriel Spark
#50. I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.
Paul Park
#51. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
#52. This is important. Money on its most basic level is a hard fact - you either have it or you don't. But on it's emotional level it is purely a fiction. It becomes what you let it become.
Kent Nerburn
#53. What happens when you don't know the truth but you can't believe the lies, when you can't find a way--through fact or fiction--to give meaning to your own existence? Without a narrative for your own life, do you ever really exist at all?
Maria Goodin
#54. I stoped reading science fiction once I saw that the UFO was real. It became science fact that just hasn't been proven yet.
Mike Bird
#55. I want to board a train, and leave my books behind. I want to be so caught up in writing about the journey, that I forget that fiction & fact are not the same. The destination does not signify.
Hannah Harding
#56. They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me
that these are a fiction from first to last.
O Reason, thou (alone) speakest the truth.
Then perish the fools who forged the religious traditions or interpreted them!
Al-Ma'arri
#57. Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.
Jeanette Winterson
#58. We are tired of the pretense that we have special privileges and the reality that we have none; of the fiction that we are queens, and the fact that we are subjects.
Lillie Devereux Blake
#59. Books can be viewed as food for the mind
Stop reading and your brain can become anemic
Read junk and your thinking can become malnourished
But handle your diet with books well and your life long learning never stops
Jonathan Frakes
#60. In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.
Edward P. Jones
#61. Fact is just fiction with different storytellers
Abby Slovin
#62. I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.
Ruth Ozeki
#64. There is no fact which is not at least part fiction.
Marty Rubin
#65. The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.
Louise Bogan
#66. Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.
John Irving
#67. Because they are so humbled by their creations, engineers are naturally conservative in their expectations of technology. They know that the perfect system is the stuff of science fiction, not of engineering fact, and so everything must be treated with respect.
Henry Petroski
#68. Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.
Francine Prose
#69. In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.
James Scott Bell
#70. I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research.
Sarah Zettel
#71. Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
David Foster Wallace
#72. Feelings, too, are facts. Emotion is a fact. Human experience is a fact. It is often possible to gain more real insight into human beings and their motivation by reading great fiction than by personal acquaintance.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#73. If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.
Lorrie Moore
#74. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography nor science fiction from being literature. Such
Georges Bataille
#75. Some people, when they're called before the police, like nothing better than to spill everything, fact and fiction alike, hoping to create a good impression.
Kobo Abe
#76. I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.
Eleanor Antin
#77. The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.
Hilary Mantel
#78. When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.
Marilynne Robinson
#79. There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.
Fred D'Aguiar
#81. I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#83. A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.
Antony Beevor
#84. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore
Virginia Woolf
#85. Even thought you can't see it, my son, things are changing. Things ALWAYS change, given enough time and pressure. The very thought of that is scary to some, but change is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. It is a simple fact of life.
EXO Books
#86. Sometimes, fact mixed with fiction so thoroughly that, though no lies were told, it was hard to remember what was strictly true.
Stephenie Meyer
#87. Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.
Michael Bierut
#88. Science fiction could now be made far more convincing by science fact.
Arthur C. Clarke
#90. And now, we have no option. We can't say 'maybe' 'it's possible' 'it looks very probable ... ' No way! We have to say this is what the Bible teaches! This is fact! May 21, 2011 is the day of the Rapture, it is the day that Judgment Day begins ...
Harold Camping
#91. Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
Virginia Woolf
#92. Michael Winter's fiction is a lot like hearing him talk about his life ... harrowing in an after-the-fact hilarious way. Full of wonder and mystery. A hangover you wouldn't miss for the world.
Michael Crummey
#93. It's always great when you want scientific fact to get a really good science fiction writer to talk to you about it.
Robin Williams
#94. People in Michigan are good at separating fact from fiction. They know, better than most of the country, what happens to the economy and jobs when the scales are tipped too far in favor of one group over another.
Fred Upton
#95. Nonfiction is a form of literature that lies halfway between fiction and fact.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#96. I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't.
Jennifer Egan
#97. I have tread all three of his books and they held me spellbound interesting story. Its fiction based on fact ... mmm I like!
Harold Alvin
#98. Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.
Helen Cam
#99. The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.
Tony Kushner
#100. I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.
Sara Sheridan
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