Top 100 Truth In Fiction Quotes
#1. I contend that one is likely to find more truth in fiction. A good painting after all is more truthful than a photograph. Remember that, Young Messenger, for all your days.
Vince Vawter
#2. There is more truth in fiction than reality
L.M.Rozycki
#3. I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood.
Dean Koontz
#4. Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood - Addison Goodheart pg. 84
Dean Koontz
#5. Say, Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood. But what do I know of real people or the world, considering my strange existence?
Dean Koontz
#6. I've read more truth in fiction than in nonfiction, partly because fiction can deal with the numinous, and nonfiction rarely does.
Dean Koontz
#7. Mom says I should erase it. That this present is our reality and everything on this little drive is fiction.
She may be right. But there's plenty of truth in fiction.
Rysa Walker
#8. There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.
Henry Miller
#9. There is some fiction, in all fact; and some fact, in all fiction.
T. Scott McLeod
#10. In the 1950s, we had all these B-grade science-fiction movies. The point was to scare the public and get them to buy popcorn. No attempt was made to create movies that were somewhat inherent to the truth.
Michio Kaku
#11. In every truth there is non-truth, in every fiction there is non-fiction.
Thomas H. Ward
#12. I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.
Alison Bechdel
#13. Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.
Joan Didion
#14. Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.
Halldor Laxness
#15. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Stephen King
#16. Words have great cumulative power, but in the 21st century, a single image is much stronger. An image suggests the unvarnished truth. That is its power and its fiction.
Alexandra Kerry
#17. The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.
Gertrude Stein
#18. Pimping is an art, Whoreson. There are very few pimps in this world who can really take the title of being a pimp. Just because a man gets his money from a whore, that don't make him no true pimp. Real pimps are really rare.
Donald Goines
#19. Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
Azar Nafisi
#20. Just because some dreams never see light that doesn't make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn's but trust me the illusion is worse.
Parul Wadhwa
#21. In an era where Existence is incontestable, Truth is subjective, and Reality is perceived, fiction must mediate between the three.
Henry Martin
#22. And unbidden, floating into consciousness came the truth of his utter wretchedness. Even the very earth seemed to cry out in pain. Hodburn Wood
J. Tyson-Capper
#23. I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.
T.C. Boyle
#25. I think we need to always mimic reality in our fiction. I think that we can stir things up and reveal a truth beneath the surface in that way as well.
Christopher Rice
#26. It's not difficult to be encyclopedic in a work of fiction; it's damned difficult to be encyclopedic, I suppose, in truth.
John Barth
#27. Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we've seen can't be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.
Adam Levin
#28. People believe in everything except the reality.
Min Kim
#29. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#30. Fiction cannot betray the truth. Though it must try"...As said by Ernest Hemingway in "Blast"...The first short story in "Bullet".
Christopher J. Pumphrey
#31. Sometimes you gotta say what's in your heart... And you have to stand for what you believe. No matter what."
~'Dr. Michael C. Anders,
Stephanie Osborn
#32. The pure perfect truth of life is that we are here to create heaven on earth, to bring the perfection of what is above down to us, and in doing so to become transformed as human being into something great and beautiful.
Kathleen McGowan
#33. Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
Tim O'Brien
#34. what people write reflects what they believe - fiction is where you go to tell or read the truth that people will stare or laugh at you for expressing in real life.
Michael Marshall
#35. Books do pretend ... but squeezed in between is even more that is true - without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?
Matthew Pearl
#36. When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
Tayari Jones
#37. The best lie is the one that has an element of truth, so it's good to include something real in your fiction.
Renee Conoulty
#38. Sometimes it takes losing everything to see the truth in nothing, except love, honor, and death.
N.J. Paige
#40. We fiction writers are a brazen lot, are we not? For we, in our passion, embrace just enough truth to consecrate our delicately contrived lies.
Val Edward Simone
#41. I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.
Armistead Maupin
#42. People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored them all, though she didn't buy every one.
Louise Penny
#43. The Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the Incarnation.
J.I. Packer
#44. In death, as so often in life, truth is stranger than fiction." Why is life more unpredictable than a football game?
Joanna Eliot
#45. There is at least one truth in every myth.
Suzy Kassem
#46. It's said that there's three sides to a story: yours, mine, and the truth. Check out God in Wingtip Shoes and The Prison Plumb Line to explore all three.
Yvonne J. Medley
#47. In fear we are acting on fiction and in love we are acting on truth
Richard Gerber
#48. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.
Charles Dickens
#49. I think for some reason people are drawn to stories of all kinds, for some reason they land harder when they are "true." And yet in fiction, I think there is a lot of deeper truth, too.
T. Cooper
#50. Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.
Hilary Mantel
#52. Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true.
Javier Marias
#53. I've had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.
Chila Woychik
#54. Something in Naja's voice, in the roughness of his hands, made Arjin wonder if there might be some truth to the tales of Ansari devouring soft, young humans. The hunger and need he felt pouring off the other man frightened Arjin even as it excited him.
Augusta Li
#55. Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
Jonathan Swift
#56. I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.
John Updike
#57. I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.
Philip Sington
#58. I'm terrified of learning the truth. About my mission. About Axton. About who I really am, and what I'm capable of doing. I'd rather stay in denial. Because if there's one thing I'm certain of, it's that I'm not going to like the truth of my apparent new reality.
Siobhan Davis
#59. The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#60. There's something about the thousands of glittering lights, the veil of nighttime that almost makes this place beautiful, especially in the reflection of the water. It makes everything askew, disoriented. There's more truth in a ripple of water than in a clear day.
Ellie Lieberman
#61. The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#62. All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.
George R R Martin
#63. I feel like a sailor, or better, like an explorer of the immense universe of art. The artist is a discoverer in search of the keys that open the door to emotions and feelings . Art is the place where rationality, fantasy, truth and fiction mix up in a detonating mixture.
Augusto De Luca
#64. In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
Wallace Stegner
#65. Thus set up, pen in hand, for the sake of greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal? The
Yann Martel
#66. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.
J.I. Packer
#67. This is Fiction, and the truth is whatever you make it. You can interpret the situation in any way you want, and all of the scenarios could be real
and what's more, depending on how you act now, any one of them could become real.
Jasper Fforde
#68. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.
Eudora Welty
#69. To talk nonsense in one's own way is almost better than to talk a truth that's someone else's
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#70. The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction.
David Ignatius
#71. The kernel of truth sank into the fertile soil of [her] imagination, possibilities for a happy resolution suggesting themselves in vague flashes of potential and promise...
Ana Chapman
#72. The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#73. 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.
J.G. Holland
#74. That was when I realised a sad but incontrovertible truth: I was a geek, and there was no getting around it. I could dress in Kate's clothes, but it didn't make me Kate.
Sharon Sant
#75. Love at first sight might be fiction, but most fiction has a grain of truth in it, right?
Pauline Creeden
#76. Everyone has secrets. Fiction allows people to see themselves in characters, to discover healing and truth when their 'reputation' or shame won't let them pick up a non-fiction book. They can watch characters struggle, then experience the truth that sets them free.
Susan May Warren
#78. Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth?
Jess Walter
#79. What came to me later in those dark, dreaming hours put paid to that though and as always my mind led me treacherously back to the bleak and inescapable truth.
There was no cure for what one had seen or done.
Hannah Blatchford
#80. 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.
Augusten Burroughs
#81. The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.
Alaa Al Aswany
#82. It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
Gao Xingjian
#83. I've played drug dealers, all my life. I've made a career of killing people and playing all kinds of killers. The violence and drugs is portrayed in exaggeration. This is fiction. That is how I looked at it. And, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Just open a newspaper.
Benicio Del Toro
#84. Each of the sapiens brains generates its own perception of God in uniquely different ways. Ergo, it imposes different qualities of meaning and value on God. You see God the way your brain wants you to see it. There is no right and wrong, or fact and fiction on this matter. It is all personal.
Abhijit Naskar
#85. When it [truth] emerges it often bears out the saying that 'truth is stranger than fiction.' A novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occur in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology .
Bill Vaughan
#86. Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.
Jerry B. Jenkins
#87. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.
David Foster Wallace
#88. Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own "real" world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.
Leonard S. Marcus
#89. Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver.
Scott Turow
#90. The exquisite truth is to believe in something that maybe you know is a fiction, but you believe in it willingly.
Roberto Benigni
#91. A gritty grain of truth lay at the heart of most legends, she had told me, and the slow accretion of fiction hardened in layers around it.
Caroline Llewellyn
#92. From The Spiral Dance to Dreaming the Dark to Truth or Dare, Starhawk has led us to places of risk and guided us to think in a new way, a womanly order. Now, in fiction, with the aid of her characters, she will save the earth and all the sacred things that dwell therein.
E. M. Broner
#93. All maps are fiction when the world is seen from the sky. But if ten thousand dragons choose to believe in this one, I think you will find it nearer truth than otherwise.
Naomi Novik
#94. In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts ... It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that's quite important ... truth with fiction.
Janet Leigh
#96. All you need do, Bernie,"she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, "is present the truth as fiction.
James Purdy
#97. When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.
Samuel Laman Blanchard
#98. As every reader knows in his or her heart, there is much more to truth than mere fact.
Alison Croggon
#99. Isn't there some truth in all fiction?" "There's some fiction in all truth too.
Catherine Lowell
#100. See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.
John Sladek
