"Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction."
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."
"Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it."
"Yet the romances planned by the brain of the novelist or dramatist are poor in comparison with the romances of real life—life wrongly termed commonplace, but which, in fact, teems with tragedies as great and dark and soul-torturing as any devised by Sophocles or Shakespeare. Nothing is more strange than truth—nothing, at times, more terrible!"
"The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense."
— Tom Clancy (attributed)
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable... Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.
—Sherlock Holmes, A Case of Identity
Thus, God can work with the most mindbending coincidences, far-fetched plot devices, and perverse dramatic ironies, never giving a moment's thought to whether or not his audience will buy it. You [the novelist] do not have that luxury.
Nish: Hang on, are these real headlines?
Rachel: They're real, Nish. They're genuine headlines. Welcome to the world.
We're a heavily medicated society. All the drugs we take: Prozac, Effexor, Valium. I thought for the last ten years, we've been on some weird fucking drug - the whole country - called 'Fukitol.' What a weird fucking drug. And we're just coming out of it and we're kind of waking up. Fuckin' A!
It's weird. It's like you're going 'last thing I remember was the economy was working and there was a budget surplus.' Yeah! 'Where's Clinton?' We impeached him. 'Fuck! For what?' A blowjob. 'Wow! Who did he blow, Putin?'
No! No, he got blown by a Jewish girl. 'Wow! He got head from a Jewish girl? Fuckin' A! And they impeached him for that?' Well, he lied about it. 'He's married! Who wouldn't? What the fuck?' No, he lied about it to Congress. 'And THOSE fuckers impeached him? That's like a group of lepers judging a beauty contest. What the fuck? Wow, that's nuts!'
And then they acquitted him. 'Oh, cool. And who was president next? Gore?' No, Bush. 'He was already president!' No, this was his son. 'Oh, the one from Florida. He's kinda cool.' No, the one from Texas. 'JUNIOR? Fuck! My God, he... the one who traded Sammy Sosa?' Fuck yeah! 'How was he as president?' Kinda goofy. 'Really?' He waved at Stevie Wonder. 'What the fuck!'
It's like, 'Wow! And then what did he do?' Well, he took a lot of vacations. 'And then what happened?' We got attacked. 'By who?' Osama bin Laden. 'That guy from Afghanistan? Didn't we used to send him weapons?' Yeah, I know! 'We went after him, right?' Yeah. 'Did we get him?' Almost. 'Well, what do you mean 'almost'?'
Well, we went after Hussein, because he had weapons of mass destruction. 'That guy from Syria. I knew that fuck would do this.' No, the one from Iraq. 'SADDAM Hussein? Bush Sr. kicked his ass!' Yeah, he did! 'And we got him?' Oh, fuck, we got him. 'And we found the weapons of mass destruction? Cause he would tell you where they are.' Well, they executed him.
'Fuck off! And did you get bin Laden?' Almost. We got four of his number threes. 'Okay. But he's in Afghanistan.' Maybe. He might be in Pakistan. 'Well, let's go after him in Pakistan!' Well, there's a problem there. They're allies, and they have weapons of mass destruction. 'Oh, no!'
'What about the economy?' Well, we had to bail out the banks. 'Again?' Fuck, yeah! 'And now, who's the president?' A black guy. "Oh, yeah right." Yeah, there's a black president and a Latino on the Supreme Court. "There is? Oh, my God! Who's the president? Jesse Jackson?" No, his name is Barack Hussein Obama. 'Now you're fucking with me!'
— Robin Williams, Weapons of Self-Destruction
"The world is weird. Never challenge it to get weirder. You'll lose."
— Jane Harrington-Price, Magic for Nothing
"Sometimes, the truth about life in North Korea can be just as striking as the urban legends. For instance, you may've seen claims online that 'every teacher in North Korea is obligated to play the accordion.' We could not confirm that, although in trying to, we did discover that North Korea does love the accordion to a surprising extent. The country is full of them. Here is an accordion factory. Here's some schoolchildren playing the accordion. Here's Kim Jong-un looking at an accordion. Here is an air combat exercise, where the camera pans across pilots and guess what? Yep. It's a fucking accordion.
They also have a very popular song called 'Nothing To Envy In The World' that begins with the line 'The sky is blue, my heart is merry, let the sound of accordions ring.' And then there is this video of North Koreans playing the last song that you would expect. ... Yes, that is North Korean accordionists playing 'Take on Me'. So, beat that, everyone else who plays the accordion! By which I mean, exactly two old French men, and one "Weird Al" Yankovic."
"More vicious than the myth."
"The truth is stranger than YouTube."
—Hiroshi, Refreshing Stories
The game you couldn’t put down.
The story you couldn’t make up.
—Tagline for Tetris (2023)
