Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
- Mark Twain
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
- Oscar Wilde
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
- Stephen King
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
When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction.
- Steven Wright
In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.
- Lin-Manuel Miranda
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
- Simone Weil
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
- F. Sionil Jose
Science is constantly proved all the time. If we take something like any fiction, any holy book, and destroyed it, in a thousand years' time, that wouldn't come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they'd all be back because all the same tests would be the same result.
- Ricky Gervais
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
- Stanley Kubrick
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
- Ray Bradbury
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
- Richard Dawkins
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
- Tom Clancy
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
- Virginia Woolf
This is the real magic of fantasy fiction: it can feed souls and change lives.
- David Gemmell
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.
- Neil Gaiman
Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
- John Hersey
I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.
- John Dalton
Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
- William Blake
The truly unique trait of 'Sapiens' is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course, not all fictions are shared by all humans, but at least one has become universal in our world, and this is money.
- Yuval Noah Harari
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
- Henry Miller
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
- Isaac Asimov
Virtual reality, all the A.I. work we do, all the robotics work we do - we're as close to realizing science fiction as it gets.
- Jensen Huang
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
Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.
- Jimi Hendrix
When you write fiction, you can sort of invent more but also pack it with emotions that are very pertinent to you. Whereas with nonfiction, you have to be as factual as possible but also hopefully - also bring... emotional relevance to the piece.
- Oscar Hijuelos
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.
- Jim Rohn
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
- V. S. Naipaul
Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
- Francis Bacon
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
- Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.
- Marion Zimmer Bradley
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.
- Harlan Ellison
It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.
- Nancy Thayer
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
- Lord Byron
Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?
- Luis von Ahn
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.
- Stephen Hawking
I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
- James Joyce
A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.
- Chloe Zhao
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
- Arthur C. Clarke
Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.
- Leo Rosten
Truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen.
- Hunter S. Thompson
I love historical fiction because there's a literal truth, and there's an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.
- Jewell Parker Rhodes
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
- George Hickenlooper
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
- John Kenneth Galbraith
A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
- Ernest Hemingway
I find it very satisfying to write because you can purge many things and vent what you feel under the mask of fiction.
- Steven Berkoff
The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
- Alfred Adler
I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems. I believe mankind has looked at climate change in the same way, as if it were a fiction.
- Leonardo DiCaprio
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.
- Margaret Atwood
Life is much weirder than fiction; nothing's more absurd.
- Peter Mullan
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
- Mark Twain
I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.
- Maya Angelou
We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
- Plato
And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.
- Jerzy Kosinski
Remember, science fiction's always been the kind of first level alert to think about things to come. It's easier for an audience to take warnings from sci-fi without feeling that we're preaching to them. Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that's worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true.
- Steven Spielberg
It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn't have an eventful childhood.
- Harper Lee
A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
- Edward Albee
There is a saying: 'The child is parent to the adult', which means whatever happens to you as a child or teenager affects the adult you become. You are forged in your history. And fiction is an incredibly important force in shaping children, and that's why fiction needs to be diverse.
- Malorie Blackman
No man ever freely surrendered a portion of his own liberty for the sake of the public good; such a chimera appears only in fiction. If it were possible, we would each prefer that the pacts binding others did not bind us; every man sees himself as the centre of all the world's affairs.
- Cesare Beccaria
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It's like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?
- Bill Nye
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
- Yann Martel
When it comes down to it, the reason that science fiction endures is that it is, at its core, an optimistic genre. What it says at the end of the day is that there is a tomorrow, we do go on, we don't extinguish ourselves and leave the planet to the cockroaches.
- J. Michael Straczynski
For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.
- Friedrich Durrenmatt
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
- John le Carre
Many of my favorite survivors in fiction show that it may not be the most muscled, macho or mighty people who pull through. A strong mind and body aren't always enough. You might also need a resilient heart.
- Claire Cameron
Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.
- Paul Theroux
Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.
- Robert Anton Wilson
You look at John Travolta in 'Pulp Fiction', you look at Donnie Wahlberg in 'The Sixth Sense.' People have liens against them in crazy ways and the audience is always forgiving - if you prove it.
- Seth Green
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
- Raymond Chandler
All fiction is based on truth - 'Madame Bovary' is based on a true story!
- Leila Slimani
I have so many favourite science fiction films. I would say 'Alien' and 'Aliens' are two of my favourite sci-fi films. Also 'Children of Men' would be one of my favourite science fiction films. I love the original 'Solaris' and the remake. And even though it wasn't a film, the series 'Battlestar Galactica' was one of my favourite TV shows.
- Pedro Pascal
I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.
- Quentin Tarantino
My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.
- Melissa Gilbert
Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.
- Rick Moody
Evangelicals have, for decades, believed that the country was more conservative than not, more Christian than not. The bipartisanship on religious liberty and the civic faith of the country was conducive to that. Now they've woken up to a reality in the Obama years that this was a polite fiction.
- Ben Domenech
Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'
- Bharati Mukherjee
One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.
- Raymond Queneau
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.
- Isabel Allende
I prefer fact to fiction.
- Richard Attenborough
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.
- David Foster Wallace
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
- John Cheever
One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.
- Patrick Rothfuss
Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.
- Raymond Carver
I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.
- Armistead Maupin
In science fiction, we're always searching for new frontiers. We're drawn to the unknown.
- Ridley Scott
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
- Jhumpa Lahiri
The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.
- Antony Beevor
I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
- Philip Roth
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
I think that prog rock is the science fiction of music. Science fiction speculates on what the future might be and look like and how we'll get there, and yet there's always a central theme of humanity, or there should be. Progressive rock has the same concept of exploration into the parts of the music world that hasn't been explored.
- William Shatner
In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.
- Peter Matthiessen
In 'Cosmicomics,' I came close to science fiction - I was inspired by cosmological subjects and the workings of the universe and invented a character who was a sort of witness to everything that was happening inside the solar system.
- Italo Calvino
As writers, we are sketching people all the time when we write fiction.
- Rajkumar Hirani
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
- Oscar Wilde
We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.
- Isaac Newton
Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism.
- Maggie Stiefvater