“Italo Calvino said the artist reveals that bit of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. Art is all about the art of lying. The artist’s imperative is to create a supreme fiction, a lie that, paradoxically, discloses a truth. It's precisely this kind of paradox that Calvino and Fellini adored.”
On truth and lies, in O Estado de São Paolo (November, 2003)
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Damian Pettigrew 16
Canadian filmmakerRelated quotes

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”

Source: 1920s, "Picasso Speaks" (1923), p. 315.

“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.

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”
Kunst ist Magie, befreit von der Lüge, Wahrheit zu sein.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 143
Minima Moralia (1951)

[Ghatak, Ritwik, Cinema and I, 1987, Ritwik Memorial Trust, 75]