A Quote by Jeremy Northam

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling. — © Jeremy Northam
Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.
It's very difficult to measure the impact on policy of any investigative journalism. You hope it matters to let a little more truth loose in the world, but you can't always be sure it does. You do it because there's a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. When in doubt, tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
Sometimes I don't tell the truth, which is telling the truth about not telling the truth. I think people don't tell the truth when they're afraid that something bad's going to happen if they tell the truth. I say things all the time that I could really get into trouble for, but they kind of blow over.
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.
I mostly associated video game storytelling with unforgivable clumsiness, irredeemable incompetence - and suddenly, I was finding the aesthetic and formal concerns I'd always associated with fiction: storytelling, form, the medium, character. That kind of shocked me.
My thing is to try to tell the truth as honestly as possible. For me, the weight is, how can I tell the truth through fiction, the best that I can?
In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.
Fiction is no longer the dominant storytelling device of our time. In the 19th century it worked great, and fiction was the king, but it's not the king any more.
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.
In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.
The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.
Dali Lama said, 'when you open the heart of the person with humor, you can tell him the most truth. But if you tell him truth without humor, the heart closes.'
I love the whole kind of notion of transformation for me is (what) excites me about not only acting, but storytelling. I love, I love that notion of a slightly larger-than-life artistic truth, you know, magnifying real emotional truth (or) finding something about human condition (which), you wouldn't necessarily think you can learn from characters such as Kong or Gollum, but actually they are, you know, these huge amplifications of a human psyche and I suppose those kind of roles have always attracted me definitely.
The challenge in any kind of storytelling, as far as I know, it is, you're looking for the moment that is completely unexpected, but at the same time, you think to yourself, 'Of course, that's the only way it could have gone.' It has to feel like it's the truth of it.
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