Ralph Waldo Emerson:
It is to be hoped that, by patience and the Muses’ aid, we may attain that inward view . . . which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle beholden.
    And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to the facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history. . . . In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—dwell care, and canker, and fear.  With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.  Round it all the muses sing.
   “Love”

Mario Vargas Llosa:
Though no great novel can be called realistic without more or less misconstruing the term (for either all novels may be so termed, since they are all nurtured by real facts, or else no novel is realistic, since even the most mediocre of them transfigure their material to at least a minimum degree in order to turn it into fiction), it is nonetheless surprising that for more than a century Madame Bovary, a novel in which mind becomes matter and matter mind, has been taken as an example of realism, in the sense of a pure literary duplication of the real.
   The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary

Lucien Andrieu in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot:
Flaubert was an artist.  He was a writer of the imagination.  And he would alter a fact for the sake of a cadence; he was like that.  Just because he borrowed a parrot, why should he describe it as it was?  Why shouldn’t he change the colours round if it sounded better?

Jean Cocteau:
A cult of speed does away with craftsmen to such an extent that the patience, the manual dexterity essential for the creation of the best, is no longer found except in those who adapt mechanics to such a purpose.  Reading was once a craft.  It is falling into disuse.  People rush.  They skip lines.  They look at the end of the story.  It is therefore normal for the hasty to prefer memories of facts that give rise to works to the works themselves, and absent-mindedly to swallow the tools, through weariness at having to  chew what they  carve.  This is also why people prefer conversation to the written word, because it can be listened to with half an ear and demands no effort.
   The Difficulty of Being
   (translated by Elizabeth Sprigge)

Dawn Powell:
A writer, for purposes of future collecting of material, needs personal privacy and disguises.  Since telling the truth is merely a version of events anyway and nobody else’s “truth,” the essential thing is to convey similar effects, similar emotions and in my own case arrive at artistic truth by artistic means, instead of handicapping myself by withholding some facts and enlarging or distorting others.  Better to fictionalize all—more pleasure and more freedom.  Deciding this, I believe I can achieve much more interesting and worthwhile effects.  Dance Night was completely fiction as I was working on it.  Yet it is more autobiographical (with facts translated into their own value emotionally and structurally) than any autobiography I can imagine.
   Diary Entry, December 4, 1943

Eric Kraft:
Imagine, please, an island, a small one, not in some pellucid subtropical sea, but in a gray bay, shallow, often cold, and on the island imagine an old hotel, where an aging dreamer, Peter Leroy, lives with his beautiful wife, Albertine Gaudet. 
   Albertine runs the hotel, and Peter spends much of each day sitting in a room on the top floor, writing the Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, his life story. 
   If you could look over his shoulder and watch him at work, you would be likely to find that he was re-writing an episode from his past, making of his life a story that it never was, because when he reminisces he finds that he’s as interested in the possibilities as he is in the facts, and also because memory, like an old radio receiver, picks up a lot of static. 
   Preface to Leaving Small’s Hotel

A Topical Guide to the Complete Peter Leroy (so far) is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this guide may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. 

Portions of A Topical Guide to the Complete Peter Leroy (so far) were first published by Voyager, Inc., as part of The Complete Peter Leroy (so far).

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.