Narrative Truth Quotes

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

What we want to see is stories that are going to be honest stories about the characters that we're telling them about.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

All the truth in the world is held in stories.

The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.

He says every story has at least some truth in it, even if most are made up.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

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.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

I don't believe that narrative works when it's trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth.

My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

This is an IMAGINARY STORY...aren't they all?

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.

It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

I believe that a writer has to tell what they think is the truth in a human experience. The truth of the human experience cannot escape the political.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached.

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.