I have always had a fascination with that statement, as many times as I've superficially thought it to be true to life. There is an inherent supplication to the notion of a truth that is real and provable, and that by definition informs fiction, which is somehow inferior due to its lack of "truth". But as anyone who's read a novel and been completely sucked into a world seemingly real, if not always entirely like one's own, there is a need for fiction to mimic the real in order to be believed, in order to bring a reader into a suspension of belief that can be total, seamless enough to guide them wherever a writer wants them to go.

That is the inherent power of story. To me, nothing is as powerful as story, and the many times you will find that someone has altered or shifted aspects of their own life in service of it proves the primacy of story over truth. Which doesn't entirely erase the strangeness and sometime unbelievable quality of truth.

Fiction needs the strangeness of truth to be believed.

That is how I would rewrite this statement. They feed off one another. They need one another to survive, to be very two even as they're very one and the same.

It strikes me that an insistence upon "truth" makes the one insisting upon it sound immature and lazy. Because truth in its strangeness can always be manipulated, and we are always the characters in other people's stories as well as our own. The trouble is that we hew so tightly to a shaky idea of truth über alles that we fail to look for the elements of untruth, of fiction, of story, hidden in plain sight. And so we are manipulated time and time again.

Note: the photo I have used is a picture of my maternal grandmother's second cousin, Princess Dürrüshawar of Berar, with her husband the prince, and her father, the last Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, Abdulmecid II, who was my great grandfather's cousin.