The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
What matters is the imaginative truth.
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact.
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.
When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.
It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.
