Source: Dead as a Doornail
“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”
“Who has time to make up stories when the truth is so much more interesting?”
Source: It Had to Be You
Gavin Stevens in Ch. 17; also in this chapter Gavin Stevens reflects — twice — that men are "interested in facts too".
The Town (1957)
“To overcome the resistance to truth, literature makes use of fictions that are images of truth.”
How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)
Context: Literature... seeks to entertain — and why is this?... The reason, fundamentally, is that literature knows something that science does not: the human resistance to hearing the truth. Science does not inform scientists of this basic fact.... The wisdom of literature arises mainly from its attention to this point. To overcome the resistance to truth, literature makes use of fictions that are images of truth.
“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
Source: Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.”
Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)
Context: We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
Part 2, Chapter 4, “The Mystery of the Champagne Supernovae” (p. 122).
Jack Glass (2012)
