A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man" and other guys start to smile but he's dead. That's a true story that never happened.

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

My own story is like a fairy tale nobody would believe because it's exactly what you expect but it never happened.

""Good stories are rarely true."

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened.

Person who has told many many stories that weren't true

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

I can’t tell you if the stories are true. Men lie without meaning to. They talk as if they had been part of a thing that happened to someone they never knew and only heard of by sixth remove.

The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real.

Those things they said about me don’t really exist. Perhaps, they exist only in the imagination of the tale bearers.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.