Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.
Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..
if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.
The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...
The best fiction is true.
Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.
