A Quote by Richard Posner

Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible.

Richard Posner

Quote Topics

Because Fact Fiction Make Most Often Plausible Stories Stranger Stranger Than Fiction Than Try Writers

Quote Author

Richard Posner
American - Lawyer
Born: January 11, 1939

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

Neil Gaiman

It's hard to find really original, compelling works of fiction, for women especially. I find that these true life stories about these women that I'm so blessed to play are some of the most compelling stories, and the truth is stranger than fiction.

Hilary Swank

When it [truth] emerges it often bears out the saying that 'truth is stranger than fiction.' A novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occur in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology .

Bill Vaughan

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Mark Twain

Many people have observed that truth is stranger than fiction. This has led some intellectuals to conclude that it's stranger than non-fiction as well.

Brad Holland

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Mark Twain

Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.

Leo Rosten

Fiction is more dangerous than nonfiction because it can seduce better. I think we all know this, know that deeper truths can be approached in fiction than in fact. There are risks for the reader, because after reading certain books you find you have changed irreversibly. There are risks for writers: in China, now, and Ethiopia and other countries right now, writers face real persecution.

Chris Abani

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

Ray Bradbury

Truth is stranger than fiction," as the old saying goes. When I watch a documentary, I can't help crying and then I think to myself, "Fiction can't compete with this." But when I mentioned this to a veteran manga artist friend of mine he said that "fiction brings salvation to characters in stories that would otherwise have no salvation at all." His words strengthened the conviction of my manga spirit.

Hiromu Arakawa

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.

Fred D'Aguiar

Life, my dear Watson, is infinitely stranger than fiction; stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not conceive the things that are merely commonplace to existence. If we could hover over this great city, remove the roofs, and peep in at the things going on, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions flat, stale and unprofitable.

Arthur Conan Doyle

I certainly keep my eye on Washington all the time because often life is stranger than fiction.

Beau Willimon

Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.