“A life of fiction based on fact”

“There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.”

“In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known completely, nor would we want to know every fact about an individual. Similarly, no life is ever lived according to aesthetic proportions. The "plot" of a biography is superficially based on the birth, life and death of the subject; "character," in the vision of the author. Both are as much creations of the biographer, as they are of a novelist. We content ourselves with "authorized fictions.”

“There is some fiction, in all fact; and some fact, in all fiction.”

“My whole belief in life was based on the fact that [she] loved me.”

“Don’t think I won’t know if you’re lying, I know how many bases you’ve been on, you red headed puritan. I will be able to tell fact from fiction.”