From Word To Word

A lie is never a lie if it makes the story better, if it makes the story more what it already is, if it makes the story truer to itself.  To insist that a story be slavishly consistent with reality, even and especially when the story pretends to be a true story, is most often to insist that it be a bad story, that it be untrue to itself precisely as a story. A story, in every case, is already a misrepresentation and a falsification, omitting and translating and transforming and recreating.  This does not make the story a lie.  It makes the story a story.  In the story, a lie is a lie, not when it is inconsistent with reality, but only when it is inconsistent with the story, when it does not reflect the nature and the purpose of the story.  There is no other lie, not to the story, and there is nothing that is not a story.