Fiction quotes
1.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"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."
"Do what you will this life's a fiction, And is made up of contradiction."
"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."
"Christianity is an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it."
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside fiction — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."
"Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction."
"For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction."
"Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters."
"There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person."
"When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the "Agamemnon.""
"Humanity lives in its fiction."
"As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency."
"In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity."
"Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise."
"Fiction is life with the dull bits left out."
"Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know."
"The best fiction is far more true than any journalism."
"There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now."
"Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter."
"The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction."
"The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense."
"Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction."
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."
"Far more unwaveringly, the neurotic keeps before his eye his God, his idol, his ideal of personality and clings to his guiding principle, losing sight in the meanwhile of reality, whereas the normal person is always ready to dispense with this crutch, this aid, and reckon unhampered with reality."
