“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”
Source: A Bend in the River
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Isabel Allende 60
Chilean writer 1942Related quotes
Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 9, “Committee Processes” (p. 159)
“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.”
Neil Gaiman
(1960) English fantasy writer
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.
“Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”
Leon Trotsky
(1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia
“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”
Katherine Anne Porter
(1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
Albert Camus
(1913–1960) French author and journalist
Pablo Picasso said something very similar. Perhaps it is the source? From Herschel B. Chipp’s Theories of Modern Art: "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand."
Disputed
“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
“The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.”
Malcolm Bradbury
(1932–2000) English author and academic
Page 269.
Stepping Westward (1965)