Nadine Gordimer Quotes

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.

What music can do so well is tell the truth in a subjective way.

Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way

His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

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. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

Fiction is most powerful when it contains most truth; and there is little truth we get so true as that which we find in fiction.

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

What matters is the imaginative truth.

I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.