About the author

I have tried to share this idea, in my own words, with readers, audiences and students in all the ways I can imagine and still haven’t come close to the clarity of this singular expression:

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.

— Vladimir Nabokov

For instance, none of this true