Truth Or Fiction Quotes

#1. Do you want the truth or fiction?

Jon Chopan

#2. As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn't really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.

Kate Atkinson

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

Jorge Luis Borges

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. All story fiction is both truth that happens and never happens. Fiction is always about humanity, even if no subject is humanitarian or even human.

Richard Bunning

#10. Nothing stayed, nothing ever changed. But love, only love, that was the true part of the story, no matter what the beginning, middle or end.

Selena Kitt

#11. Where there's life, there's learning, and the truth is always calling us out of our pride. If we don't harken, it will call louder, and throw a situation at us. A pebble at first. If we still don't listen, we'll get a stone. Then a rock. Then a great crashing boulder. We must learn, or die.

Orna Ross

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. As every reader knows in his or her heart, there is much more to truth than mere fact.

Alison Croggon

#15. I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

John McGahern

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Jack picked a piece of mint from his glass and chewed on it for a second. "I'm curious," he said,
"is telling someone to relax ever helpful? It's like saying 'breathe' to someone who is
hyperventilating or 'swallow' to a person who's choking. It's a completely useless admonition.

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

#19. There is truth in stories," said Arthur. "There is truth in one of your paintings, boy or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not a fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.

Cassandra Clare

#20. To annoy or piss off are light offences. I'd say if you abuse the goodness of a novelist or a writer, the truth is, he or she can kill you multiple times or cannibalise you in many antagonist characters.

Angelica Hopes

#21. She slapped him. Hard. "Tell me!" she screamed, "TELL ME!".
"The truth is...I am a liar," Jack said quietly.
"Don't be one with me," she sobbed, "it hurts."
"The lies or the truth?" he asked.

Abhik Chatterjee

#22. The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.

Vance Palmer

#23. Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

George R R Martin

#24. Xander, there are two certainties in life--death and truth. They will both pursue you to your grave. There is no escaping them. But we run from them anyway in hopes that somehow we can slip by unnoticed. In the end, one or both of them catch up. Running doesn't solve anything.

A.C. Williams

#25. Love is not measured by acts or years, but by truth between two people.

Evan Meekins

#26. What child didn't wish to know if his bedtime stories were the stuff of fiction or of truth?

V.E Schwab

#27. Truth or dare ... truth ain't fair.
Marshal Robert Quantrell - Belle Starr: Dead Man's Hand (work in progress)

Belinda McBride

#28. Good Fiction hangs a story of a framework or lies that tells an emotional truth.

Marie White Small

#29. Teach them the shame that tells the lie, "I am unforgivable," when the truth is, "I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control." Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage.

Geoffrey Wood

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

Nadine Gordimer

#31. Artworks, whether fiction, music, or painting, because they have the power and possibility to become truth, when repeated enough or told enough are somehow truth about what America is, whether they were or not.

Cynthia Daignault

#32. Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#33. Anyone who claims that truth is stranger than fiction has never gazed into a writer's mind, or read my stories.

Lucian Barnes

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. "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

#38. 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

#39. There's no right or wrong way. There's only the truth.

Siobhan Davis

#40. Fiction is but truth.. tweaked or disguised.

Syed Arshad

#41. The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.

Lisa Scottoline

#42. 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

#43. I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.

Charles De Lint

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.

Colum McCann

#49. As a fiction writer I am not always sure where reality ends and non reality begins, when sane thoughts become less than sane, or what is imagination versus undiscovered truth, but ultimately, it is my job to make you as unsure as I am.

Kathryn Mattingly

#50. 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.

#51. 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

#52. The truth is, time marches on and you have two choices: You move forward, come what may, and you experience all the sour and sweet things that fly at you from around corners, or you sit still. Don't sit still.

Suzanne Palmieri

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. Truth is only stranger than fiction if you're a stranger to the truth. Which means you're either a liar or you're fictional.

Pseudonymous Bosch

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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