Artistic License Quotes

“Artistic license, also known poetic license, narrative license, and licentiate poetical, is a colloquial term (employed occasionally as a euphemism), which denotes a license to distort the facts, alter the conventions of grammar or language, or reword pre-existing text by an artist in the name of art. Liberal usage of an artistic license to restructure basic facts can result because of conscious or unconscious acts. Artistic embellishment or misrepresentation of the facts and distortion or alteration of the compositional text frequently is the by-product of both intentional and unintentional additions and omissions. An artistic license, employed at an artist’s discretion to fill in details or gloss over factual and historical gaps, raises some ethical issues. Many stories retold verbatim would bore an audience or require inordinate time and resources to reenact, describe, and view. A dramatic license eliminates mundane details and tedious facts, spruces up the picturesque background, and glamorizes the characters’ temperament and action scenes. Is it wrong to be inventive with the facts? What degree of embroidery of a series of events and the characters’ mannerisms and attributes is acceptable? How can anyone paste together a set of facts into an interesting or compelling narrative that has literary value without engaging in some creative organization to enhance the theatrical retelling and to create juxtaposition of ideas and values?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“And Ningauble began to sort out in his mind the details of the Mouser's story, treasuring it the more because he knew it was an improvisation, his favorite proverb being, "He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.”
― Fritz Leiber, Swords in the Mist

“Beware the storyteller with a huge grievance and an artistic license.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“Protons, electrons and photons were scattered equally throughout, so that the emission and absorption of energy balanced each other in perfect equilibrium: a state of affairs known as 'black-body radiation'. At something over 379,000 years after the big bang, the universe had cooled down sufficiently to form neutrally charged atoms, which could not absorb all the thermal energy as perfectly as before. Instead, high-energy photons began to travel on their own through space, rendering the universe transparent instead of opaque. As the universe expanded over the subsequent 15 billion years these photons lost energy and red-shifted.”
― Philippa Lang, Science: Antiquity and Its Legacy