…you don’t become a novelist to become a spinner of entertaining lies; you become a novelist so you can tell the truth.
Hilary Mantel, “The Day is for the Living” (Reith Lecture 1, June 13, 2017)
Art reveals something beyond the message. A story or poem may reveal truths to me as I write it. I don’t put them there. I find them in the story as I work.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Teasing Myself Out of Thought” (2008) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 48)
The are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another…Both can be used as a means for convincing another. Yet what they convince [us] of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 11)
But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 25)
The real truth lies in structures like my thalamus and hypothalamus, and my amygdala, and I have no conscious access to those no matter how much I introspect.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 112)
The reason you must stick by the truth is that it is better, stranger, stronger, than anything you can make up. If its shape is awkward, then you must make your fictional technique so flexible that it can bend around the difficulty; because it is the shape of your narrative the reader will follow. You can select, elide, highlight, omit. Just don’t cheat.
Hilary Mantel, “Can These Bones Live?” (Reith Lecture 4, July 4, 2017)
But fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small ‘t’…‘T’ Truth is located behind, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed. Because the [bad script-]writer sees only what is visible and factual, he is blind to this truth of life.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 24)
The moment you start on your fact-finding journey, whether you know it or not, you have taken the first step toward finding a premise. The premise is the motivating power behind everything we do.
Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (1942, p. 9)
When the reader of a story asks, ‘How do I know which bits of this are true?’ he must ask that question of the historian, as well as the novelist.
Hilary Mantel, “The Iron Maiden” (Reith Lecture 2, June 20, 2017)
When I’m writing nonfiction I have to be very aware of my tendency to let the words take their own course, leading me softly, happily, away from fact, away from rigorous connection of ideas, toward my native country, fiction and poetry, where truths are expressed and thoughts connected in an entirely different way.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Forward” in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. ii)
If one is arguing about social ‘realities’ like democracy or equity or even gross national product, the reality is not the thing, not in the head, but in the act of arguing and negotiating about the meaning of such concepts.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 122)
Mathematical truth may be pleasing, elegant, light. Historical truth is a rough beast—shapeless, blundering, hard to tame. It fights you every step.
Hilary Mantel, “Can These Bones Live?” (Reith Lecture 4, July 4, 2017)
Even when they convey truths, stories enormously simplify the processes involved. They single out a small number of actors, actions, causes, and effects for easy understanding, and articulate far better with assignments of responsibility than do ordinary scientific explanations.
Charles Tilly, Why? (2006, p. 65)
Nations are built on wishful versions of their origins: stories in which our forefathers were giants, of one kind or another.
Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it—information is not knowledge. And history is not the past—it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. … It’s no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey.
Hilary Mantel, “The Day is for the Living” (Reith Lecture 1, June 13, 2017)
…given story’s power to influence, we need to look at the issue of an artist’s social responsibility. I believe we have no responsibility to sure social ills or renew faith in humanity, to uplift the spirits of society or even express our inner being. We have only one responsibility: to tell the truth.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 130)
If we crave truth unmediated by art we are chasing a phantom. We need the commentator’s craft, even to make sense of the news. We need historians, not to collect facts, but to help us pick a path through the facts, to meaning. We need fiction to remind us that the unknown and unknowable is real, and exerts its force.
Hilary Mantel, “Adaptation” (Reith Lecture 5, July 11, 2017)