All stories are true. But some of them never happened.

History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict...

They weren’t true stories; they were better than that.

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How...

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn’t matter what they do, because everything...

There’s always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won’t reflect the storyteller’s true beliefs, it...

Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

Fiction just makes it all more interesting. Truth is so boring.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do...

Fiction wouldn’t be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.

We don’t read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we’re living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

…required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you’re really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn’t usually work out that way.

Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.

real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

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...

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.

I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn’t exist.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

…all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s...

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors–we hope–of your life come from reading fiction.

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..

The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing – and everything – about it is real.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

T.G.T.B.T: too good to be true.

A good book isn’t written, it’s rewritten.

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational...

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end...

Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth...

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”[Q&A with...

A related question is where in time to begin. Should you begin far back in a character’s past and move forward, or should you begin in the present and make use of flashbacks only where...

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our...

There were no absolutes in fiction, no certain way to deliver what was needed. So it was no surprise most technical writers considered novel-writing a gateway to madness.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

Why should I want to make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot...

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.