The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.
It is heartbreaking to me that I wasn't told the truth. I'm a very loyal guy, and I expect loyalty in return. And lying to me is not an exhibition of loyalty.