On Fiction Quotes

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
― Jessamyn West

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”
― John Cheever

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
― Michael Cunningham

“But wishes are only granted in fairy tales.”
― Simone Elkeles, Perfect Chemistry

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
― Doris May Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

“Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.”
― Phyllis A. Whitney, Guide to Fiction Writing

“But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― David Foster Wallace

“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.”
― Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

“While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
― Michael Scott, The Warlock

“Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.”
― Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

“All stories are true. But some of them never happened.”
― James A. Owen, The Search for the Red Dragon

“Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.”
― George Gordon Byron