“Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.”
Source: Freedom™ (2010), Chapter 2: Operation Exorcist, Character: a principal from the lobbying firm Byers, Carroll, and Marquist (BCM)
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Daniel Suarez 20
American writer 1964Related quotes
“The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”
Attributed to an interview on Larry King Live; also quoted in Quotable Quotes (1997) edited by Deborah Deford
Attributed variant: The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
Clancy here expresses an idea evoked in similar statements made by others, all derived from the orignial made by Lord Byron:
Lord Byron: Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
Mark Twain: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't.
G. K. Chesterton: Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
Leo Rosten: Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense. (attributed)
1990s
Book III Ch. II as quoted by Florian Cajori (1899), as Aristotle's explanation of why bodies fall quicker in exact proportion to their weight.
On the Heavens
“fiction always surpasses reality but reality is always richer than fiction.”
Source: Outlaws
“The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers.”
Source: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006), Ch. 5, p. 70
“Obamacare is a marketplace in the same way the Knockout Game is a game.”
“Desperately Needed: Dose of Kim Jong-un Justice” http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/desperately-needed-dose-of-kim-jong-un-justice/, WorldNetDaily.com, February 13, 2014.
2010s, 2014
“Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas.”
The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. 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.
“The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.”