Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Stephen King uses this aphorism in the context of explaining how storytelling works: invented events and characters (“lies” in the literal sense) can nevertheless convey emotional, psychological, and moral truths about human experience. The line is associated with King’s reflections on craft and the writer’s job of making the unreal feel real—an outlook shaped by his career as a popular novelist whose work often uses horror and the fantastic to explore ordinary fears, grief, addiction, and community dynamics. It is most commonly cited from his nonfiction writing about the practice and purpose of fiction rather than from a particular novel.

The quote distinguishes factual accuracy from a deeper kind of truth. Fiction “lies” because it fabricates, but it can be “true” insofar as it reveals patterns of feeling and behavior—what people want, dread, deny, or endure. King’s phrasing also defends genre writing (including horror) against the charge of escapism: the supernatural surface may be implausible, yet the story can still tell the truth about trauma, guilt, love, power, or mortality. Implicitly, it defines successful fiction as persuasive illusion in the service of insight: the lie must be convincing enough to carry the truth to the reader.

“Fiction is the truth within the lie.”