It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.
Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
Unscrupulous agitators have been at work spreading atrocity stories which can only be compared with those lies that were fabricated by the same instigators at the beginning of the Great War.
It's actually pretty complex, because there's two levels of reality in the narrative. One is what really took place, and the other is Spider's poisoned version of what took place.
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.
Love on the rocks, ain't no surprise. Pour me a drink and I'll tell you some lies.
Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
There are so many movies like this, where you thought you were smarter than the screen but the director was smarter than you, of course he's the one, of course it was a dream, of course she's dead, of course, it's hidden right there, of course it's the truth and you in your seat have failed to notice in the dark.
...but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.
In fiction the narrator is a performance of voice, and it can be any style of voice, but I'm interested in the ways that a voice that knows it's telling a story is actually telling a different story than it intends to. In the way that I can sit here and tell you what I had for breakfast, but I'm really telling you that I'm having an affair, something like that. And I don't think my writing is plain, but I think a lot of my characters are just talking. There is vulnerability there, in that we can start to see through them, we can start to see where they're deceiving themselves.
