“All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.”
Quoted in Mickey Pearlman, Listen to Their Voices (1993), ch. 12
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Shirley Abbott 6
1934Related quotes
“A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.”
On the connection between the personal and fictional world in “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘This could be the beginning of a revolution’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/28/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-feminism-racism-sexism-gender-metoo in The Guardian (2018 Apr 28)
“All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.”
Source: Children of the Mind
Interview with Weird Tales (24 May 2007) http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/2007/05/24/george-rr-martin-on-magic-vs-science/
Context: I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep. I know there are elements in the field, particularly in science fiction, who feel that the differences are very profound, but I do not agree with that analysis. I think for me it is a matter of the furnishings. An elf or an alien may in some ways fulfill the same function, as a literary trope. It’s almost a matter of flavor. The ice cream can be chocolate or it can be strawberry, but it’s still ice cream. The real difference, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction.
“No more fiction for us: we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.”
Sec. 624, as translated by Tobias Dantzig in Number, the Language of Science. Fourth edition, New York: Doubleday 1954, p 141. See discussion of this entry for details.
The Will to Power (1888)
Niebla [Mist] (1914)
Context: All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?
“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.