The great liberation of imaginative writing is that you're not held back by the facts.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact.
The idea that you're not a writer until you're published is a lie.
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.
I don't have a great respect for reality or getting the 'facts' as a means of putting together a story.
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.
As soon as you sit down to write about something you are pressing your nose deeper into the sewer of facts.
I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.
The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.
The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.