“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer
Source: Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
“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.
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Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist
Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952) for The Sea Around Us; also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
Misquoted as "Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." by Laurence J. Peter in "Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time", among many others.
Following the Equator (1897)
Source: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
“Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.”
Charlaine Harris book Dead as a Doornail
Source: Dead as a Doornail
“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States
“A play is fiction — and fiction is fact distilled into truth.”
Edward Albee (1928–2016) American playwright
The New York Times (18 September 1966)
“Non-fiction contains facts, fiction contains truth.”
Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist
Next Testament (Boom Studios, 2014)