Short answer:
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction
is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." (Mark Twain)
Long answer:
"The untrained man reads a paper on natural science and thinks:
`Now why couldn't he explain this in simple language.' He can't
seem to realize that what he tried to read was the simplest
possible language - for that subject matter. In fact, a great
deal of natural philosophy is simply a process of linguistic
simplification - an effort to invent languages in which half
a page of equations can express an idea which could not be stated
in less than a thousand pages of so-called `simple' language."
(Thon Taddeo in _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ by Walter Miller, 1959)