There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."