narrative embellishment Quotes

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

The best way to spoil a good story is by sticking to the facts.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

So, then, the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war-stratagem the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it pleaseth him; having all, from Dante’s Heaven to his Hell, under the authority of his pen.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.