The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

Fiction is often the best fact.

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

All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

If one were to reply that those who compose these books write them as fictions, and therefore are not obliged to consider the fine points of truth, I should respond that the more truthful the fiction, the better it is, and the more probable and possible, the more pleasing. Fictional tales must engage the minds of those who read them, and by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility, they enthrall the spirit and thereby astonish, captivate, delight, and entertain, allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace; none of these things can be accomplished by fleeing verisimilitude and mimesis, which together constitute perfection in writing.

I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.

For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.

I think that in some ways maybe we've come to think of fiction as a lie. It's like the word “myth,” which means “lie” for many people; yet, myth is the highest form of truth. It is about the inner journey, about others before us who have gone that way and civilizations. It is about our life's task of becoming. In some ways I think fiction is like myth, but also fiction takes a fact or an event, even an imagined one, and it makes truth out of it. Prose is a process of uncovering, of getting to the bare, unstated facts of living. Maybe they are inner facts, maybe they are not historical, but they tell the highest truths.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

There is more truth in their romances than in learned chronicles.