“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”
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Khaled Hosseini 226
novelist 1965Related quotes
“To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.”
Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson, Edinburgh University Student Publications.
The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
“Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”
“Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.”
Or, for that matter, as true.
Source: The Areas of My Expertise (2005), p. 18
“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”
Letter to critic Stephen Pile, Sunday Times (London) (January 18, 1981)
In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (1991)
Context: I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people.
A Language Older Than Words (2000)