Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King
Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible. — Richard Posner
Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive. — Karen Russell
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction. — Tom Wolfe
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. — Mark Twain
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. — John Lennon
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. — Simone Weil
The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion — Donna J. Haraway
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism. — William Faulkner
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. — Neil Gaiman
Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire. — J. G. Ballard
Short Fiction And Reality Quotes
Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. — Ulysses S. Grant
Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions. — Farley Mowat
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. — Ivana Trump
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism. — Neil Gaiman
Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form. — Jean-Luc Godard
Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies. — Eileen Chang
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more interesting. — William Randolph Hearst
Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form. — Jean Luc Godard
Fiction And Reality Image Quotes
Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
What Is Reality Quotes
What separated me from all my homeboys is the fact that I didn't get caught inside the reality. I was always dreaming about doing something else or going somewhere else. — Kendrick Lamar
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. — Jim Morrison
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness. — Jerry Garcia
Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.
I've discovered most Christians don't know what to do with difficult situations because they have bought into the lie that God owes us (for our good behaviour). The reality of life is that if you live long enough you are going to bleed, cry and hurt. AND God is still God IN that. — Matt Chandler
To step into tomorrow's possibilities you must let go of yesterday's realities. Be careful of your choices between what was, is and will be. It is very hard to fully step into your destiny while you are still holding on to your history. — Christine Caine
Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality. — Abraham Lincoln
All human unhappiness comes from not facing reality squarely, exactly as it is.
What one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous - that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego. — Albert Hofmann
Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be. — Frank Zappa
Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality. Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you. Say yes to its fierce, ruthless, and loving grace. — Adyashanti
What I look for is neither reality nor unreality but the subconscious, the instinctive mystery of the human race. — Amedeo Modigliani
Fiction Becomes Reality Quotes
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. — J. G. Ballard
The fiction is like the art, in making stuff out of nothing, in creating a hyper-reality to have an experience. If it's strong enough, and your spell is strong enough, then you become, like, ultra-magnetic and then everything comes to you. — Watkin Tudor Jones
She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in. — Maggie O'Farrell
The once-science-fiction notion of hyper-connectivity - where we are all constantly connected to social networks and other bubbling streams of digital data - has rapidly become a widespread reality. — Geoff Mulgan
Fantasy And Reality Quotes
There are lots of imposters in this earth, and to very first there always comes a second, to every reality there always come a fantasy, and the fantasy wants to come and live the life of the reality — Peter Tosh
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. — Dr. Seuss
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.
Open your eyes,
Look up to the skies and see,
I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy,
Because I'm easy come, easy go,
Little high, little low,
Any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me, to me. — Freddie Mercury
Be careful what you say. Words do not only describe reality. Words create reality.
Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it. — Lloyd Alexander
Your mind doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy. Your mindacts on what you feed it. Feed it good thoughts. — Zig Ziglar
I believe fantasy and dreaming can be made a reality. You don't have to be rich. You don't have to be a VIP. — Rachel Zoe
We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline and effort.
Maybe every other American movie shouldn't be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence. — Bill Maher
The three most disastrous inventions of our time have been the birth control pill, the camera and nuclear weaponry. The first offers sex in terms of sterility, the second reality in terms of fantasy, and the third security in terms of destruction. — Malcolm Muggeridge
Reality depresses me. I need to find fantasy worlds and escape in them. — Noel Fielding
Reality and fantasy, we need both of those to survive. If we don't have fantasy, dreams and all of those things, what's the point of carrying on? And you need to watch out for reality because buses come. — Terry Gilliam
Reality And Fantasy Quotes
Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do. — Maurice Sendak
See fantasy is what people want, but reality is what they need. And I just retired from the fantasy part. — Lauryn Hill
Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged. — Stephen King
Dream... but don't sleep.
Faeries are not fantasy, but a connection to reality. Faeries are irrational, poetic, absurd, and very, very wise. Faeries say there is nonsense in dogma, and sense in nonsense. Faeries express themselves with high seriousness and low humour. Faeries are resistant to all definitions. — Brian Froud
The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment, when you are between asleep and awake, when you don't know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened. — Oprah Winfrey
It has been a long time since I believed in Reality. I prefer the loveliness and the terror of my subjective experiences to those coldly scientific explanations which in the long run turn out to be no more real, and far less fun, than my own fantasies and musings. — Sheldon B. Kopp
Defeat is a state of mind: no one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality.
Positive self-direction is the action plan that all winners in life use to turn imagination into reality, fantasy into fact, and dreams into actual goals. — Denis Waitley
The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance. — Michael Crichton
I mean, I could go ahead and cut my head off in the guillotine, and it looks great, ... Well, now you turn on CNN and guys are really getting their heads cut off. ... As insane as our fantasy world gets, it's nowhere near as scary as reality. — Alice Cooper
In visual futurism, the line between total fantasy and futuristic is a thread of reality. — Syd Mead
Imagination And Reality Quotes
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined... — Henry David Thoreau
Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. — Alan Watts
I have visualised my imagination so clearly and so consistently that it has manifested itself into my reality. — Conor McGregor
Control is an illusion, let it be, and enjoy the peace.
The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden. — H. P. Lovecraft
The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation. — Keith Haring
Don't let someone else's opinion of you become your reality.
Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting -- intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen. — Uta Hagen
Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality. — Irving Howe
Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives. — Robert Collier
Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives. — Sidney Madwed
Fact And Fiction Quotes
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. — Hannah Arendt
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
Your job as a smart investor is to separate the facts and the news from the fiction and the noise. — Chamath Palihapitiya
Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true.
The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality. — Chris Chocola
It's what we live for, to be able to make great illusions. The thing about 'Entourage' is everything we do is realistic. We go to the real places, we shoot on location. We get the real people. It's a perfect marriage between fact and fiction. — Adrian Grenier
An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences. — Rafael Sabatini
Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that. — Rick Moody
There aren't really rules for painting, but there’s certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They’re like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention. — Vija Celmins
Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts. — Herman Melville
Fiction And Nonfiction Quotes
I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority. — Peter Matthiessen
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. — Joan D. Vinge
To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction. — Nawal El Saadawi
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning. — Arundhati Roy
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place. — Jamaica Kincaid
When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea. — Douglas Preston
There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher. — A. Scott Berg
I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that. — Ayelet Waldman
In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury. — Tom Robbins
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. — Donna J. Haraway
A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy. — Isak Dinesen
In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts... It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that's quite important... truth with fiction. — Janet Leigh
I'm an unashamed realist, and actually, I try to make whatever the script is the reality of that situation, even though it's fictional. — Wolfgang Petersen
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction. — Yann Martel
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. — Jean Baudrillard
As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event. — Brock Yates
Reality TV now doesn't feel reality TV when it started. The line between reality and fiction is blurred. So many of these people are phony or shallow, in their own right. If you've ever watched any of The Real Housewives, or those types of shows, they're all performing. Even though they're real people, they're performing. — Portia de Rossi
The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible. — Mark Twain
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins. — Salman Rushdie
Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent I, the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality. — Elizabeth Hardwick
If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination. — Harold Brodkey
In my world of the people who study war and defense issues, we simply did not talk about robotics. We do not talk about it because it's seen as mere science fiction. It's cold, hard, metallic reality. — Peter Singer
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination. — Jeanette Winterson
If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality. — Jean-Luc Godard
I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. — Ray Bradbury
Gaston Milhaud, like many of his contemporaries, sought to overthrow empirical positivism by insisting on the fundamental reality of the mind, but mind conceived in the Kantian sense. The knowledge of nature is symbolic, and there is no necessary connection between the phenomena and our fictions. — Fulton J. Sheen
Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them. — Ray Bradbury
In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root. — Roland Barthes
Time limits are fictional. Losing all sense of time is actually the way to reality. We use clocks and calendars for convenience sake, not because that kind of time is real. — Leslie Marmon Silko
The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. — Flannery O'Connor
All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life. — Garrison Keillor
All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you. — Nora Raleigh Baskin
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality. — J. G. Ballard
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future. — Jean Baudrillard
I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers — Philip K. Dick
I'm able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are. — Curtis Sittenfeld
If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you. — Jodi Picoult
They should hold themselves absolutely upon the immovable foundation of truth and nature, whereby alone they can save themselves from misapprehensions and from the danger of being entirely carried away from reality into mere dreams and fictions. — Ethan A. Hitchcock
It is a misrepresentation to call my works fiction; the work loses something when categorized this way. I realize that the stories are somewhat unbelievable, but the fact that they do actually unfold in reality and leave evidence, that they play out in the "real" world, is important to the work. I am the protagonist of the story, but I am not in full control of it. — Jill Magid
Nowadays, you can be yourself. You don't have to put on façade. You can be who you are and still be just as successful as the ones who put on the fake façade. You know, it's like reality is just as important as fiction. — Ice Cube
Reality and fiction are really mixed up. The frontier between reality and fiction is tremendously porous and slippery. And in fact, when I remember something that has happened to me a long time ago, let's say twenty years ago, many times I'm not sure if I have actually lived what I am recalling, or I have dreamed about it, or I have written about it, or I have imagined it all. — Rosa Montero
I make non-fiction partly because I'm not that good of a writer. My talent, if I have any, is in balancing, capturing and directing reality, rather than creating scenarios. — Robert Greene
In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat. — Simone de Beauvoir
Like a lot of writers, I just got sick to death of conventional fiction. I absolutely couldn't stand the illusion of reality and plot. I just couldn't stomach it. — Jane Alison
It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality. — Michael Helm
I think we need to always mimic reality in our fiction. I think that we can stir things up and reveal a truth beneath the surface in that way as well. — Christopher Rice
I had artists that refused to work on Chappie if they were working on a design that actually said Denel on the side of the thing. But anyway, it's the blurring of fiction and reality that was appealing and I certainly did not want them to be in the movie and not be themselves. — Neill Blomkamp
If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality. — Chris Abani
Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and - although it's reductive to say so - fiction has perhaps been more about the differences between the unconstrained world of the imagination and the realities you run into, day-to-day, when you're riding your donkey. — Chad Harbach
In Conclusion
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