Reality Vs Fiction Quotes & Sayings

It's a true image, born of a false spectacle. — Jean Genet

As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event. — Brock Yates

Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Literature is a source of pleasure, he said, it is one of the rare inexhaustible joys in life, but it's not only that. It must not be disassociated from reality. Everything is there. That is why I never use the word fiction. Every subtlety in life is material for a book. He insisted on the fact. Have you noticed, he'd say, that I'm talking about novels? Novels don't contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder: What would I have done? It's a question you have to ask yourself. Listen carefully: it is a way to learn to live. There are grown-ups who would say no, that literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are wrong. Literature performs, instructs, it prepares you for life. — Laurence Cosse

The person - especially a woman - may be disillusioned by the fact that over time a man's affection turns out to be only, so to speak, a cover for desire or even for an explicit will to use. Both a woman and a man may be disillusioned by the fact that the values attributed to the beloved person turn out to be fiction. Because of the dissonance between the ideal and the reality, affective love is sometimes not only extinguished but even transformed into affective hatred. — Pope John Paul II

One day I decided to move towards documentaries or to move to more directing in documentaries at this point in my career. Why documentaries? I also love fiction. I would love to direct a fiction movie as well. But I think where I come from, reality is so interesting and has in it so many good stories to tell, this is why I'm doing that. I'm enjoying that. — Dror Moreh

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. — Flannery O'Connor

In fiction: we find the predictable boring. In real life: we find the unpredictable terrifying. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality. — Lance Reddick

His suffering was no more real than he was. — Johnny Rich

It's not fiction's job to be photographically representative of reality. If I want to make a fictional world where there's no kindness, this doesn't mean I believe there's no kindness in the real world. In fact, what it may mean is that I very much value kindness. Like if you make a painting in which only greens are allowed, it wouldn't mean you don't believe in blue. — George Saunders

Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interpets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks-none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial compostion; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details. — Isabel Allende

Non-fiction is to theory as fiction is to experience. — Joyce Rachelle

Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. — James Wood

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. — Flannery O'Connor

While researching my first book, I discovered so many fascinating tidbits that I wanted to share them with readers to remind them that while the book was fiction, the situations were based on historical realities - some of which were pretty hard to believe. — Julie Klassen

People without hope do not write novels ... [Writing fiction] is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal. — Flannery O'Connor

It was one of those dreams from which she woke up depressed about her reality, filled with a longing that pulled at her insides, wishing the dream could have lasted forever, or at least much longer than it had. — Michael Monroe

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The — Timothy Snyder

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent. — Philip Roth

Kafka's fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It's a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there's no map. — Franz Kafka

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion — Donna J. Haraway

Job understood that he was nothing more than God's invention and so too was his suffering — Johnny Rich

Inhumanity is part of humanity as much as suffering is a part of stories. Cruelty is written in the human script. — Johnny Rich

But life isn't neat the way a story is. And if you try to pretend it is, then you just make yourself unhappy, or screw yourself over. — Dexter Palmer

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

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn't mean we aren't telling the truth; we've simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don't go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It's the story we shape and improve on, we don't change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear. — Ann Patchett

Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea? — Dexter Palmer

If you make fiction just as valuable as reality, then any reality you don't need can be a delusion — Ryohgo Narita

Fiction has to be well researched, properly conceived and logically presented.
Reality needs none of the above. — Manoj Vaz

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. — Donna J. Haraway

I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do ... — John Geddes

Past memories strobed before him, flashes of joy blackened by the present. Reality teased, then beckoned, home likewise. Confusion dimmed, the answer clear. This could end. Would end. In one of two ways.
Still he refused, not ready for either. — Marcha A. Fox

Lucifer endears himself to us only as the Lord of Lies, for in this role he is most convincing as a character, which is to say, as a fiction that has been so fully realized that he misguides us with a false feeling of our own reality because we are the ones who made him: he is subordinate to us, especially in the art of lying. For the acephalics among us who have said that the Devil's greatest trick was convincing the world that he did not exist, it must be said back: if he did not exist, then neither would we. — Thomas Ligotti

Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Fiction described reality better than non-fiction. — Tommy Wallach

Don't believe everything you read or hear, remember a large part of our world is made up of fiction!! — Victoria Addino

There are tales that rise like the early sun, breathe, and take on a life of their own. There are ones that flow quietly and effortlessly until time forsakes them, but there are others that fight until they find their way to the edge of reality, as if coming straight out of a dream. — Edwin Fontanez

If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you. — Jodi Picoult

From the front row of the balcony, I look out over the Uptown Cinema. The red velvet seats are emptying, the credits scrolling up the screen. Ginger Rogers married a Nazi, but Cary Grant got her out of it. Their ship is sailing to America; sun burns away the fog and the wind blows free. Now they are gone and I am coming back to reality, breathing a harsher air. It is how I always feel when a movie ends. — Kermit Roosevelt III

Life is travelled at a pace one decides for themselves — Chandra Sekhar

Reality is but several levels of consciousness that can be accepted or dismissed depending on what one perceives. — Lauren Lola

We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology. — Jean Baudrillard

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Fantasy writing must be grounded in both truth and life experience if it is to work. It can be as inventive and creative as the writer can make it, a whirlwind of images and plot twists, but it cannot be built on a foundation of air. The world must be identifiable with our own, must offer us a frame of reference we can recognize."
"Fantasy stories work because the writer has interwoven bits and pieces of reality with imagination to form a personal vision. — Terry Brooks

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you're a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you're a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie. — Jean Rouch

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life. — Ralph Peters

I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289) — Azar Nafisi

Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation in modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on. — Jonathan Gottschall

Fantasy - and all fiction is fantasy of one kind or another - is a mirror. A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it's a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see. (Fairy tales, as G. K Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.) — Neil Gaiman

In a fairy tale, the story can't be altered. The prince and princess will never have a fight. You'll never hear the queen raise her voice. No on ever gets sick; no one ever gets hurt. Maybe love is only safe in places where it can't change. — Jodi Picoult

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. — Barbara Kingsolver