A Quote by Donna Levin

There's an expression, "God is in the details," and it applies to nothing more than it does to the writing of fiction. To that and to the art of telling good lies. And what is fiction but the telling of lies?

Donna Levin

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Art Details Does Expression Fiction God Good Good Lies Lies More Nothing Telling Than Writing

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Donna Levin
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Born: September 4, 1954

Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.

Siri Hustvedt

The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.

David B. Coe

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

Lauren Groff

America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe.

Thomas M. Disch

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.

Jean Rouch

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

W. Somerset Maugham

Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.

Joan Fontcuberta

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

Joanna Scott

I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and just as well predicated, but the big difference between me and you is that I'm honest and you're dishonest. I know I'm telling you lies.

Peter Greenaway

Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.

A. S. Byatt

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

Arundhati Roy

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Paul Harding

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

George R. R. Martin

I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.

Karl Iagnemma

Telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.

Pietro Aretino

The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.

George Pelecanos

A Quote by Donna Levin

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