A Quote by Neil Gaiman

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Neil Gaiman

Quote Topics

After Fiction Lie Tells Truth

Quote Author

Neil Gaiman
British - Author
Born: November 10, 1960

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.

Neil Gaiman

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

Dorothy Allison

Pablo Picasso said, "Art is the lie that tells the truth," and it's not a terribly radical statement. It's always been that you can tell truth through fiction. And this idea also comes from nuclear physics.

Momus

Picasso said, 'Art is a lie that tells the truth.' What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

Nicolas Cage

Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth. What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

Nicolas Cage

Governments lie; bankers lie; even auditors sometimes lie: gold tells the truth.

William Rees-Mogg

Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

Stephen King

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

Suppose whether or not someone tells me a lie depends only on whether he wants to, but he is morally indifferent, he doesn't care much about the truth or about me, and his self interest, which he worships, tells him to lie, and so it comes about that given his psychology, it is a forgone conclusion that he will lie to me. I think in this case he is still blameworthy, and that implies, among other things, that he did something he ought not do.

Nomy Arpaly

As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.

Ben Bradlee

Facts are facts, and fiction is fiction, and a lie doesn't become truth just because it appears on the front page of the newspaper.

Scott Pruitt

Sarah Paulson doesn't lie. Like, in life. But she doesn't lie onscreen, and you can't take your eyes off somebody who always tells the truth. She's the most honest person I've ever met.