Wallace Stegner on truth vs. fiction

"You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true."

From an interview with Stegner by Richard Etulain, quoted in the afterword to Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety. I don't normally quote fiction writers in this blog, but his words are equally valid for songwriters. As discussed in my book The Complete Singer-Songwriter, the line between reality and fiction is often blurry in great songs--what matters is the deeper emotional truth.