Top 100 Truth Of Fiction Quotes
#1. The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them ...
Susan Sontag
#2. Perhaps no one religion contains all the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together. Or perhaps the elves are right and there are no gods. But how can I know for sure?" - Pg 479 Brisingr
Christopher Paolini
#3. 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
#4. There is some fiction, in all fact; and some fact, in all fiction.
T. Scott McLeod
#5. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
Nina Sankovitch
#6. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#7. But there are times, I would argue, when fiction delivers the greater truth.
Leslie Cockburn
#8. When is truth pleasing? It is only when we clothe it's nakedness with rags of imagination, or sweeten it with fiction, that it can please.
H. Rider Haggard
#9. "Faith is what's wrong with the world, Aidan. Or don't you follow the news?"
"That's not faith," he says. "That's the complete lack of it. If any one of those mass-genocidal idiots had faith, they wouldn't have the insane need to prove it to others."
Cyma Rizwaan Khan
#10. There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.
Christopher Fry
#11. Fiction is but truth.. tweaked or disguised.
Syed Arshad
#12. 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
#13. Never underestimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.
Leslie Feinberg
#14. 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
#15. Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?'
'For fun?'
'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.
John Fowles
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.
Arundhati Roy
#21. Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking 'muck' across the floor of fact.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#22. The great cause of fiction is to weave a bag to carry truth.
Penelope Wilcock
#23. Did you ever see a giraffe? It is like something from between the regions of truth and fiction.
Geraldine Jewsbury
#24. Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.
Jeremy Northam
#25. The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.
Richard Russo
#26. Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.
Chelsea Cain
#27. 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
#28. I fear that so often we Christians give the idea that the truth is fiction by the way we live and by the lack of dedication to the teachings of our Lord.
Billy Graham
#29. 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
#30. Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
Tim O'Brien
#31. How can we learn the value of saying no, if we didn't occasionally say yes?
F.D. Lee
#32. I write what I feel, fiction with a twist of truth. I don't write because I want to, I write because I have to.
Jack Tate
#33. 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
#34. People tend to focus on the "magic" more than the "realism." But, like all fiction, fantasy arrives at truth via the road of untruth.
Salman Rushdie
#35. Vaheguru, forgive me, but a woman must choose the wisdom of lies over the dangers of truth.
Shauna Singh Baldwin
#36. I have found that those who try to shield us from the truth, regardless of the reason, end up doing the greatest harm. Truth alone sets you free, not lies and omissions.
Jessica Dotta
#37. True story of quantum mechanics, a truth far stranger than any fiction.
John Gribbin
#38. To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game ... speak the truth and hear the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#40. The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship
Kinky Friedman
#41. Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
Mark Twain
#42. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never
any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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.
Nicholas Delbanco
#46. I think one of the big challenges about science fiction is finding truth to relate to as an actor.
Amanda Schull
#47. The Taellywood treasure beckoned us. All of us ached for God's wisdom. We had so many questions. We wanted to know why things happened the way they did. We needed to know. We desired the truth and we yearned for answers to many of life's questions.
Pat Patrick
#48. On occasion we stumble upon what seems to be a truth. Compared to the surrounding blackness, it sparkles and dazzles our eyes. But are these actually truths? Are our eyes really feasting upon light? Or just patches of grey?
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#49. Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
Khaled Hosseini
#50. There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Doris Lessing
#51. Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.
Stephen King
#52. An interesting fiction ... however paradoxical the assertion may appear ... addresses our love of truth- not the mere love of facts expressed by true names and dates, but the love of that higher truth, the truth of nature and principals, which is a primitive law of the human mind.
James Fenimore Cooper
#53. 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
#54. I fear Michaelson not at all. Michaelson is a fiction, you fools. The truth of him is Caine. You do not comprehend the distinction; and so he will destroy you.
Matthew Woodring Stover
#55. I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.
Eleanor Antin
#56. 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
#57. Most tales carry a kernel of truth, else they're soon forgotten.
Karen Azinger
#58. It was a fictional story, but like any good fiction, without the need to adjust or conceal the truth, it actually might be
the greatest expression of truth.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
#59. I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.
Ruta Sepetys
#60. Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true.
Mark Twain
#61. All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.
Walter Dean Myers
#62. 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
#63. Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
Joyce Carol Oates
#64. You have always known they exist. Everyone feels their presence. Few know the truth. The world of Real Immortals is about to be revealed!
John T. Montgomery
#65. Your mind is your bitch," he says. "The truth is you can teach it to do anything. You have to program your brain to your commands, not other people's.
Cyma Rizwaan Khan
#66. Are you scared of me now?" She wanted the truth.
"More than ever." He had lowered his guard, putting himself at her mercy, because running away had only served to make him understand that he could never run away from who he was.
Llarjme
#67. 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
#68. Writing fiction is a way of expressing feelings and revealing a certain truth about life, goals, dreams and desires.
Ann Marie Aguilar
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.
Victor Hugo
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.
George R R Martin
#77. 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
#78. There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
Ralph Ellison
#79. 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
#80. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.
J.I. Packer
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Our pasts haunt us all.
I regaled my beautiful audience of one with the tale of my life, not so much for entertainment, but for bold, barefaced, honest truth.
Ross Turner
#87. When we as writers take our fears, beliefs, imaginations, and research and offer them up for the Lord to use, we are changed, and our fiction carries the power of truth and the fingerprints of our God on every page.
Amy Wallace
#88. One word came to mind: pee-yew. Evan tried to place the odor; it wasn't a heap of decayed garbage or that of a spoiled fish. Truth be told, he smelled like rotten cheese.
H.B. Bolton
#89. The aim of fiction is honest and absolute truth.
Anton Chekhov
#90. Love at first sight might be fiction, but most fiction has a grain of truth in it, right?
Pauline Creeden
#93. 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
#94. Grayson: Fiction is just a lie anyway.
Brianna: But it's not - it's a different kind of truth - it would be your truth at the time of the writing, wouldn't it?
Nora Roberts
#95. Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.
Stephen King
#100. 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
