Truth Vs Fiction Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

In Mere Christianity, no less than in his more fantastical works, the Narnia stories and science fiction novels, Lewis betrays a deep faith in the power of the human imagination to reveal the truth about our condition and bring us to hope. "The longest way round is the shortest way home"2 is the logic of both fable and of faith. — C.S. Lewis

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook - that prissy little virtue, Temperance - for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended. — Geoffrey Wood

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

Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language - or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us read these stories that we know are not 'true' because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. — Orson Scott Card

Some truths are hard to swallow, so we share it within tales that most people will accept without being frightened by the truth hidden within. — Larry Itejere

If all that one sees is a tiny speck of perspective in the larger scheme of things. And each perspective is made alive by the amalgamation of learning. And learning is a mere accumulation of skill and knowledge : both deriving from Truth. And Truth is not absolute but more of a figment of one's imagination made apparent to the senses. Then all, or for the most part, is fiction. — Nikhil Sharda

All self-expression is the product of the imagination, so how can we speak of an objective reflection of the real in words? Or an accurate rendering of the past - speak, memory - as if our memories are the thing in itself and can be reconstructed in words. Fiction or fact? How can you spot the difference, how can you really be sure, when the game seems to be hiding the truth by telling you 'this is the truth'? — Bruce Gatenby