[gerdesj]

Sir Terry Pratchett often declaimed in his novels that "Million to one chances happen one times in ten".

The statistical terms used are completely wrong but the intention is clear: weird shit happens.

[NaturalPhallacy]

"Fiction has to make sense, reality can do whatever it wants."

[lostlogin]

You sound like someone who has witnessed the last 5 years.

[NaturalPhallacy]

The idea is a bit older than that:

Clancy here expresses an idea evoked in similar statements made by others, all derived from the orignial made by Lord Byron:

Lord Byron: Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

Mark Twain: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't.

G. K. Chesterton: Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

Leo Rosten: Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense. (attributed)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy#Larry_King_Live_(20...

[hutzlibu]

I just thought, he made fun of the stereotypical heros taking their one in a million chance and allways succeeding, meaning it is a physical or dramatic law that one in a million chances are 100% guaranteed.

(mainly refering to "Guards! Guards!", where they intentionally make one guards bow shot harder, to make his shot (at a dragon) a million to one chance, so it becomes a 100% shot, nice absurd logic and of course it does not work, but the chance for them surviving the stunt was one in a million..)