Quote

There are a lot more tabloids in England that like to report other things in your life, some of which are true and some of which are exaggerated and untrue. There have been stories where people claim to have seen me in one place and I wasn't even in that city then. The Aussie press is more judgmental and moralistic.

Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.

The law is agnostic about truth. It's very skeptical of ultimate truth. That's why freedom of speech permits lies to be told.

As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.

The England I write about doesn't strike me as the real one.

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.

The act is truth. Nothing that was ever recorded is truth. Nothing that was ever said is truth. Only the act.

In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.