On Writing Fiction

person. Give him a mask, and he will tell the truth.”

Oscar Wilde once said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.

This is why Graham Greene suggested that a good memory was incompatible with good fiction writing. “All good novelists have bad memories,” he said. As Robert Olen Butler explains, “What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.”

As Robert Olen Butler explains, “What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.”

This is why Graham Greene suggested that a good memory was incompatible with good fiction writing. “All good novelists have bad memories,” he said.