„fiction always surpasses reality but reality is always richer than fiction.“

"China on China, Culture for Billions" Documentary

Quelle: The Stanislaski Brothers: Mikhail and Alex

Letter (September 1915), published in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Vol. 5, p. 509 ISBN 0521323894

Letters to World Citizens (2004)

"Inner Landscape : Interview with J.G. Ballard" by Robert Lightfoot and David Pendleton, in Friends No. 17 (30 October 1970) http://www.jgballard.ca/media/1970_oct_friends_magazine.html; also quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews
Kontext: A hundred years ago one has the impression that people had made a clear distinction between the outer world of work and of agriculture, commerce and social relationships — which was real — and the inner world of their own minds, day-dreams and hopes. Fiction on the one hand; reality on the other. This reality which surrounded individuals, the writer's role of inventing a fiction that encapsulated various experiences going on in the real world and dramatising them in fictional form, worked. Now the whole situation has been reversed. The exterior landscapes of the seventies are almost entirely fictional ones created by advertising, mass merchandising… politics conducted as advertising. It is very difficult for the writer.
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), Introduction, p. xix; in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 56.

Unkempt Thoughts (1957), p. 93; also p. 21

"Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Crash (1973)
Kontext: We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

Variante: For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

"John Rivers" in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Quelle: The Genius And The Goddess

Games for Actors and non-Actors (1992)
Kontext: In truth the Theatre of the Oppressed has no end, because everything which happens in it must extend into life…. The Theatre of the Oppressed is located precisely on the frontier between fiction and reality – and this border must be crossed. If the show starts in fiction, its objective is to become integrated into reality, into life. Now in 1992, when so many certainties have become so many doubts, when so many dreams have withered on exposure to sunlight, and so many hopes have become as many deceptions – now that we are living through times and situations of great perplexity, full of doubts and uncertainties, now more than ever I believe it is time for a theatre which, at its best, will ask the right questions at the right times. Let us be democratic and ask our audiences to tell us their desires, and let us show them alternatives. Let us hope that one day – please, not too far in the future – we’ll be able to convince or force our governments, our leaders, to do the same; to ask their audiences – us – what they should do, so as to make this world a place to live and be happy in – yes, it is possible – rather than just a vast market in which we sell our goods and our souls. Let’s hope. Let’s work for it!

Quelle: Life of Pi

Quelle: Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Quelle: Freedom™ (2010), Chapter 2: Operation Exorcist, Character: a principal from the lobbying firm Byers, Carroll, and Marquist (BCM)

Quelle: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 1

Your Strength As A Rationalist http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/ (August 2007)