truth is stranger than fiction

Similar to fact is stranger than fiction.

Truth is always strange, Stranger than Fiction.
[1823 Byron Don Juan xiv. ci.]

Sampson was greatly struck with the revelation: he‥said truth was stranger than fiction.
[1863 C. Reade Hard Cash II. xv.]

‘Do you believe that truth is stranger than fiction?’ ‘Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction,’ said Basil placidly. ‘For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore congenial to it.’
[1905 G. K. Chesterton Club of Queer Trades 133]

There are times when truth is indeed stranger than fiction, when the teller of true tales can report things that we would dismiss as preposterous inventions should a novelist try to put them over on us.
[2001 Washington Post 25 June C2]

Related to: reality and illusion

Bibliography of major proverb collections and works cited from modern editions is available here.

Real life can be more remarkable than invented tales, as in In our two-month trip around the world we ran into long-lost relatives on three separate occasions, proving that truth is stranger than fiction. This expression may have been invented by Byron, who used it in Don Juan (1833).