“The trouble is,” he sneered, “that no one really cares. It’s not their lives, or their homes. Ours is just a story for them to have a brief catharsis over. The only way we’ll save our lives is by a good performance.”
“So, you lie?”
“I lie to tell the truth. I take the truth, I take this story and that, one atrocity over there and another over here, and boil it all down into something that will actually, maybe, shock these old corpses into action. Wake them up enough so that they’ll throw a few coins from their fat wallets at the starving plebs whom they momentarily dreamed were of the same human race as their own exalted selves.”
Tale Told 