Truth or fiction is, after all, only a matter of degree – a novel is also nonfiction and fiction, real but altered, and sometimes only very transparently.
Diane Johnson
In my intimate contact with books, first as reader and later as writer, I have come to the conclusion that it isn’t worth the trouble to make a boundary between the events that occur within the pages and those that take place outside.
Isabel Allende
The more I write, the more I discover that the partition between real and invented is as thin as a wall in a cheap hotel room.
Jeanette Winterson
It used to be that the real and the invented were parallel lines that never met. Then we discovered that space is curved, and in curved space parallel lines always meet.
Jeanette Winterson
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
Jessamyn West
In the end the truth of the story may only exist in the ability of the narrator to lie convincingly, because, as the saying goes, it takes two to lie: one to tell the lie and another to hear it. And in our age of vanishing horizons and disappearing worlds, we will need convincing lies, creative non-fiction, fictions even, to remake the world.
Ken Wiwa
Fiction relates to life in a very real way.
Margaret Laurence, A Conversation with Robert Kroetsch, 1970