Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. fiction and observing, as young Virginia Woolf did, that all art simply imitates nature: He considers this essential role of deception in storytelling, adding to famous writers’ wisdom on truth vs. Vladimir Nabokov by William Claxton, 1963 That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. In the same 1948 lecture that gave us Vladimir Nabokov’s 10 criteria for a good reader, found in his altogether fantastic Lectures on Literature ( public library), the celebrated author and sage of literature examines the heart of storytelling:

Indeed, our capacity for self-delusion is one of the most inescapable fundamentals of the human condition, and nowhere do we engage it more willingly and more voraciously than in the art and artifice of storytelling. “Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself,” Umberto Eco observed in his magnificent atlas of imaginary places.

Mary by vladimir nabokov